Altmetrics – Trying to Fill the Gap

“Waiting 1-3 years for publication and citation seems interminable. Conflating an article’s impact with its journals’ impact creates uncertainty, as well. Altmetrics attempts to close that gap by providing more timely measures that are also more pertinent to the researcher and their article. Use metrics from downloads and blogs, and attention metrics such as tweets and bookmarks, can provide immediate indicators of interest. Although metrics associated with these activities are in the developmental stage, there is growing investment in the broader landscape to produce more current metrics that serve the researcher, their communities and funding agencies. In January, the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted the work of Jason Priem ... who coined the term ‘altmetrics.’ In his post, ‘Altmetrics: a Manifesto,’ Jason noted ... that the speed with which altmetrics data are available could potentially lead to real-time recommendation and collaborative filtering systems. Jason and Heather Piwowar, who works at the Dryad Digital Repository, created Total-impact ... PLoS has been developing a suite of measures over the last three years referred to as article-level metrics (ALM) that provide a view of the performance and reach of an article. Their approach is to present totals of multiple data points... So which measures matter? Earlier this year, Phil Davis questioned Gunther Eysenbach’s assertion that tweets can predict citations in his article. Mendeley data, however, appear more relevant, and several research papers presented this year show a strong correlation with citation data. In fact, patterns of use indicate that some papers are widely shared but seldom cited while others are frequently cited but appear to have limited readership. In a recent presentation, William Gunn of Mendeley noted looking ahead that: ‘Useful as these new metrics are, they tell only part of the story. It’s a useful bit of info to know the volume of citations or bookmarks or tweets about a paper or research field, but the real value lies in knowing what meaning the author intended to express when he linked paper A to paper B. Through the layer of social metadata collected around research objects at Mendeley we can start to address this challenge and add some quality to the quantitative metrics currently available.’ A growing community is forming around the topic and the conversation in June at the Altmetrics12 program focused on exploring the use of emerging tools and sharing findings of research results... One of those tools, Altmetric.com, created by Euan Adie, won Elsevier’s Apps for Science competition last year and now is part of the family of research tools at Digital Science supported by Macmillan Publishers.  The Altmetric Explorer tracks conversations around the scientific articles in tweets, blog posts, and news that are analyzed and represented by a score in a ‘donut’ made of colors that reflect the mix of sources. An important component of the altmetric community was represented by founders of two leading academic social networks: Mendeley (which also competes with citation managers) and Academia.edu (whose competition includes ResearchGate). Since these tools enable researchers to collaborate by posting and sharing their work, the data from these systems could potentially offer fertile ground for data to support the growth of altmetrics. The most recent entrant in this arena is Plum Analytics, founded by Andrea Michalek and Mike Buschman ... Andrea is building a ‘researcher reputation graph’ that mines the web, social networks, and university-hosted data to map relationships between a researcher, his institution, his work, and those who engage with it ... The resulting data set could provide a current complement to the institutional citation analysis services offered by Thomson’s Research in View and Elsevier’s SciVal...”