ASSIS&T Bulletin April/May 2013

Use the link to access the full text article.  An excerpt reads as follows: "Altmetrics help both expand and broaden our view of the impact of academic research outputs. One can track the impact of code and data with altmetrics, not just publications, but for this article I will focus just on publications. In the new reality of online availability of research more and more people are trying to access it. JSTOR, for instance, registers 150 million failed attempts every year to gain access to articles they keep behind the paywall [4]. Articles made available via such traditional pay-to-read business models may not achieve the impact they could have simply because all potential readers may have neither institutionally provided access to the resource nor the money to buy access to it themselves. Many papers have found that OA has a citation advantage relative to subscription access articles. This effect may also be true in terms of altmetrics. For example, of the 10 most popular articles in 2012 as measured with altmetrics by Altmetric.com (Table 1), 7 out of 10 were freely accessible articles [5]. Even more remarkably, none of these 10 articles were from either of the two most widely read academic journals, Nature and Science, which both predominately publish articles behind a paywall. All of the top 10 articles clearly captured the public imagination and engagement, with the majority of activity on Twitter coming from accounts that were not identifiably scientists, science communicators or practitioners. Many of these papers may show rather unremarkable citation counts – a more traditional measure of academic impact. Their significant public impact is only revealed in a standardized way by altmetrics – services like Altmetric and ImpactStory [6] even attempt to normalize altmetrics to provide even greater context and meaning to the numbers, as well as providing open data to ensure the numbers are independently verifiable. [1] The biological impacts of the Fukushima nuclear accident on the pale grass blue butterfly (77% of tweets sent by members of the public) [2] Association of coffee drinking with total and cause-specific mortality (64% of tweets sent by members of the public) [3] Rape-related pregnancy: Estimates and descriptive characteristics from a national sample of women (82% of tweets sent by members of the public) [4] Food for thought. What you eat depends on your sex and eating companions (98% of tweets sent by members of the public)  [5] Bright minds and dark attitudes: Lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and low intergroup contact (79% of tweets sent by members of the public) [6] Unilateral dermatoheliosis (79% of tweets sent by members of the public) [7] Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior (74% of tweets sent by members of the public) [8] Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students (59% of tweets sent by members of the public) [9] Measuring the evolution of contemporary western popular music (83% of tweets sent by members of the public) [10] Classic Nintendo games are (NP-)hard (78% of tweets sent by members of the public) ..."