Beyond the Impact Factor: Altmetrics A look at altmetrics and their growing significance to researchers Hardy Schwamm Research Data and Repository Manager Tel. (01524)

1.What are Altmetrics and why are they useful? 2.The Altmetrics Landscape – Altmetric – Impactstory – PlumX 3.Benefits and Concerns 4.Lancaster University and Altmetrics Overview

N O ONE CAN READ EVERYTHING. We rely on filters to make sense of the scholarly literature, but the narrow, traditional filters are being swamped. However, the growth of new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem. We call for more tools and research based on altmetrics. Altmetrics manifesto

Bibliometrics Impact Factor Eigenfactor Altmetrics is not… Bibliometrics is a set of methods to quantitatively analyse academic literature. Citation analysis In any given year, the Impact Factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years. The Eigenfactor score is a rating of the total importance of a scientific journal. Journals are rated according to the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted higher than those from poorly ranked journals.

Measuring multidimensional impact Publications Citations ”Impact” Repositories Internet Twitter Facebook Wikipedia Usage Mendeley CiteULike News media Newspaper Television Blogs Research process Presentations Videos Datasets Research Altmetrics

Umbrella term for new metrics applied to measure impact of research outputs The term Altmetrics was proposed in 2010 Open (scripts and algorithms that collect it) Various websites and projects are calculating altmetrics Several publishers have started providing such information to readers, including BioMed Central, Nature Publishing Group, PLOS (Public Library of Science) and Elsevier. What are Altmetrics?

Metrics based on the social web What are Altmetrics? Rodgers & Barbrow 2013

How many times an output article, website, blog, dataset, grey literature, software, etc. has been: Viewed (Publisher websites, Dryad) Downloaded (Slideshare, publisher websites, Dryad) Cited (PubMed, CrossRef, Scopus, Wikipedia, DOI, Web of Science) Reused/Adapted (Github) Shared (Facebook, Twitter) Bookmarked (Mendeley, CiteULike, Delicious) Commented upon (Twitter, Mendeley, blogs, publisher websites, Wikipedia, Faculty of 1000) What do Altmetrics measure? Measure social reach in online environments

The Altmetrics landscape

Altmetric gathers mentions of scholarly output in social and traditional media, government documents,: number of Tweets, Facebook pages, mentions on Google+, Reddit, blogs or news outlets, and any readers on Mendeley, or CiteULike connected to each individual publication.mentions media Article-centric approach By 15 August 2014 Altmetric had tracked 2,310,844 articles across all journals. Altmetric score is a weighted countscore Examples: Nature, Glasgow EnlightenNatureEnlighten

Started in 2011 Nonprofit organisation funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and subscription fees ($5 per month. 1 month trial). Focuses on metrics of individual researchers. They need to create profile with their research output and Impactstory will provide metrics to create an “impact profile” (CV). Uses “percentiles” to measure impact.percentiles Imports metric data from many sources but currently not from Google Scholar and Web of Science. Example Profile

PlumX tracks five types of impact about any of 20 types of scholarly content, from articles and abstracts to source code and videos.five types Impact metrics include usage statistics such as downloads, views, holdings at libraries and ILL requests PlumX widgets can be added to repositories Examples: Article in IR University of Pittsburgh, PlumX researcher profile, institutional profile (Smithsonian)Article researcher profileSmithsonian

From niso.org (pdf)niso.org

Example of a publisher using Article-Level Metrics InformationArticle-Level Metrics Information Metrics “help users determine the value of an article to them and to their scientific community” PLOS mentions “known issues” such as robot activity and other ways that affects usage statistics Example article: Jealousy in DogsJealousy in Dogs PLOS

Altmetrics offer researchers a way to showcase the impact of papers that have not yet gathered many citations, and to demonstrate engagement with the public Offer additional measures of influence Bridge informal academic discourse with the formal output of research Altmetrics can encourage a focus on public engagement Altmetrics empower publication choice – highlighting work based on its post-publication impact, rather than the title of the journal – New journals won’t have to wait two years to get an impact factor before they can compete. Use Altmetrics to find success stories that you can mention in your CVs or on your websites. Altmetrics benefits for researchers

Usefulness of Altmetrics is controversial. What do metrics actually mean? Altmetrics are a developing, non-standardised set of tools, methods and theories Altmetrics don’t always distinguish between positive and negative attention. A mediocre paper in a popular field will receive more attention than a first-rate paper in a small field. Most articles receive little (if any) attention in the wider community, leading to scores of zero Many article-level metrics sources are not accessible (e.g. Google Scholar, Twitter only for 30 days) Concerns

Currently no Altmetrics products are being used at Lancaster, however, the Library and RSO are aware of Altmetrics and will consider their use. There will be a product presentation of Altmetrics to Librarians, ISS and others soon. Altmetrics could be displayed using Pure and Lancaster’s Research Portal (to the public?, researchers only?). Research Portal Lancaster University and Altmetrics

Article-level metrics measure the impact of scholarly articles and other products (e.g., datasets, presentations) on the social web. These measures of scholarly impact are quickly gaining ground as evidenced by the presented companies. Article-level metrics as a field is quite young and, therefore, has some issues to work out. It is hard to predict what people will want to do with article-level metrics data in the future. Should Altmetrics be included in decisions on grants, hiring and tenure? Conclusions

Roberta Kwok: Altmetrics make their mark, Nature, 2013, Vol.500(7463), pp nj a nj a Mike Thelwall, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière, Cassidy R. Sugimoto: Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services. PLOS One, 28 May urnal.pone #close urnal.pone #close Further reading

Questions and discussion

Next session… Your identity as a researcher – ORCID Find out what ORCID is, and how it can help you to distinguish your work from someone else’s. Friday 26 th September, Fylde C48