Altmetrics could enable scholarship from developing countries to receive due recognition. | Impact of Social Sciences

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-03-11

Summary:

A significant group of scholars from around the world love to hate the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). An incredible amount of ink has been spilled on describing its methodological limitations, its abuse and misuse, and its pervasive effects on “science.” But, while the loathing of the JIF (I hazard to guess) is distributed fairly equally around the world, the scholars who are affected by its use are not. It is scholars from developing regions who suffer the most egregious consequences. The problems for developing regions stem from the under-representation of developing world research in Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WoS), from which the JIF is calculated. In a seminal piece from fifteen years ago, Cetto & Alonso-Gamboa (1998) laid out the disheartening situation of Latin American journals in international information systems such as the WoS. As can be seen from the figure below, which shows the relative number of works authored by scholars from around the world in WoS, this situation has not significantly changed over time. The shortage of research from developing regions is not for a lack of research. In Latin America, to draw on the region I am most familiar with, in 2012, only 4% of Latin American peer reviewed journals were included in WoS (242 out of over 5,000) (see them in the Latindex Catalog). To give another example, two initiatives, SciELO and RedALyC, working with only a subset of these 5000+ journals, have indexed over half a million articles in regional journals, primarily from Latin American authors. Thomson Reuters recently announced a partnership with SciELO, whereby journals in SciELO will be indexed and appear in the Web of Knowledge. SciELO also calculates an Impact Factor based on its collection of over 1100 journals. However, even with SciELO, only a fraction of Latin America’s research can receive an Impact Factor. There is an abundance of locally produced and published research in developing regions, just not in WoS ... The scholarly community is abuzz with altmetrics and the related (but different) term Article Level Metrics. Ian Mulvany, Head of technology for eLife, drew a nice venn diagram depicting the distinction between the two. These metrics, derived primarily from “the social Web,” have been purposely constructed to be alternatives to the JIF. Since the drafting of the altmetrics manifesto, there has been aspecial issue, a PLOS collection, a Mendeley group, several annual workshops, an increasing number of research papers, and several altmetric start-ups. During a few months in the last 12, the termaltmetrics has even been more popular on Google than bibliometrics and bibliometric (although the termJournal Impact Factor still dwarfs both).

All of these signs indicate that altmetrics may not remain alternative for long. Whether they supplant or complement the JIF, they bring with them a promise, but no guarantees, for developing regions ..."

Link:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/03/10/altmetrics-for-developing-regions/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.altmetrics oa.citations oa.thomson_reuters oa.jif oa.impact oa.latin_america oa.redalyc oa.scielo oa.metrics oa.south

Date tagged:

03/11/2014, 16:46

Date published:

03/11/2014, 12:46