Total impact: a critical perspective

“Total impact is a set of alternative metrics for scholarship. Total impact looks at a number of factors, including social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. As a research tool, Total Impact has a lot of potential, to explore how works are used and what impact they have. As an alternative metric to evaluate the quality of scholarship - an alternative to impact factor - there are a number of potential serious problems to consider. First, there is the question of whether the current push towards quantitative metrics makes any sense at all. I have talked about the problems of this kind of instrumental rationality is my book chapter,  The implications of usage statistics as an economic factor in scholarly communication https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/954... One example, from an interview study of scholarly monograph publishers I did recently, is the impact of pushing scholars to publish more books to obtain tenure. This pressure is not consistent with the time it takes to write books that are really worth publishing and reading; so in this instance, we have a quantitative metric intended to improve quality and productivity (of our academic staff) which appears to be lowering quality (more mediocre books, more book production... Note that I do not recommend retaining Impact Factor, but rather minimizing or eliminating quantitative approaches to evaluating the quality of scholarship. The use of social networking tools may be particularly problematic. One research area that I recommend is examining the effects of traditional biases. I would hypothesize that social networking tools would be likely to exhibit the following biases prevalent in modern society: [1] men would show more impact than women [2] minorities would have lower impact [3] developing country authors would have lower impact [4] introverts would have lower impact than extraverts [5] authors adept at social networking tools would have more impact than authors less comfortable with these media. In addition, I would suggest that metrics based on social networking tools could easily be manipulated, not only by authors but also by interested others. It doesn't take much to imagine corporate polluters in favor of climate denial upping the impact of their preferred pseudo-science, or for drug companies to drive up the impact of studies making the drugs that they sell look good. Another area to consider (for all kinds of tools, not just social networking tools), is the impact of funding considerations. If universities are relying more on corporate funders at a time in society such as today when the political will seems to be on the side of the wealthy who wish to cut spending on social justice, it is reasonable to hypothesize that there will be a smaller proportion of funding for social justice issues. What happens to research on poverty issues and its impact if there is less funding for research and academic positions in this area (hence fewer researchers), at the same time that there is less funding for government services and social workers (fewer potential readers and tweeters), and many of those poverty research is meant to help have lost their homes and jobs and may find it difficult to get internet access?”