Stick to Your Ribs: Altmetrics — Replacing the Impact Factor Is Not the Only Point | The Scholarly Kitchen

There are other important value metrics beyond the strength of a journal. This might come as a shock to some STEM publishers, who have flourished or floundered based on the performance of impact factor rankings published each June. While the value of the journal as a container is an important value metric and one that needs to continue, the rapidly evolving alternative metrics (altmetrics) movement is concerned with more than replacing traditional journal assessment metrics ... At the Charleston Conference last week, I had the opportunity to talk with fellow Scholarly Kitchen Chef,Joe Esposito about altmetrics and its potential role in our community. Joe made the point, with which I agree, that part of the motivation of some who are driving new forms of measurement is an interest in displacing the traditional metrics, i.e., the impact factor. Some elements of our industry are trying tobreak the monopoly that the impact factor has held on metrics in our community so that newer publications might more easily flourish ... The inherent problem with that focus is that it misses a key point of assessment about the actual impact of a particular piece of research (or ultimately its contributor) that is represented by one or more individual articles that may have been published in multiple journals. Our current metrics in scholarly publishing have been averages or proxies of impact across a collection (the journal), not the item itself, or the impact across the work of a particular scholar or particular research project. The container might be highly regarded, and the bar of entry might have been surpassed, but that doesn’t mean that any particular paper in a prestigious journal is significantly more valuable within its own context than another paper published in a less prestigious (i.e., lower impact factor) title. The fact that there are a growing number ofpapers that get rescinded is a signal of this even within the most highly regarded titles.

Assessment is increasingly important to the communities directly related to, but not part of, the publishing community. Yes, libraries have been applying usage-based assessment and impact factor for acquisitions decisions for some time, but there is more they could/should do to contribute to scholarly assessment.  But beyond that, the academe and the administration of research institutions rely on publication metrics for researcher assessment, promotion and tenure decisions. Grant funding organizations have used the publication system as a proxy for assessing grant applicants. However, these are only proxy measures of a researchers impact, not directly tied to the output of the individual researcher ..."