As Scholarship Goes Digital, Academics Seek New Ways to Measure Their Impact - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. "There's a gold mine of data that hasn't been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact," says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea....Jason Priem, a third-year graduate student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a leader in this push to track impact via the social Web. Scholarly workflows are moving online, leaving traces that can be documented—not just in articles but on social networks and reference sites such as Mendeley and Zotero, where researchers store and annotate scholarship of interest....Mr. Priem helped write a manifesto, posted on the Web site altmetrics.org, which articulates the problems with traditional evaluation schemes...."