Notes: Altmetrics – How do I rate thee? Let me count the tweets! | Tanya Gray Jones

"Mike Taylor gave a talk today on the subject of altmetrics. Mike spent some time introducing the ORCID initiative, that enables the disambiguation of scholarly researchers by way of a unique identifier for the individual that can act as a hub for databases that contain information on research outputs such as journal articles and datasets. Mike described how the disambiguation of scholarly researchers is a big problem especially in light of increase in scholarly output, as well as the increase in global contribution to scholarly discourse. Disambiguation is reliant on good metadata which is not always available. Mike cited metadata available for this purpose as being excellent from the following countries: Denmark, Brazil, and Korea, and as being dreadful from China, India and Italy. In addition to the quality of the metadata, the issue of common metadata standards being designed for western/northern names means that it is difficult to disambiguate researchers with Asian names such as those in Korea where 3 family names cover more than 50% of the population. Mike talked again about ORCID and how a researcher profile associated with an ORCID id should be considered to be the property of the researcher, and only contain information that the researcher wants it to contain. The concept of altmetrics was then defined, as 'the collection of social network data', and reference was made to the Jason Priem  who coined the term on twitter in 2009, and to the altmetrics manifesto available at www.altmetrics.org/manifesto. Mike mentioned that whilst much research has already been conducted on the subject of bibliometrics, there is little corresponding research on the subject of altmetrics. As an example, Mike mentioned the context of an author citing a paper in a journal article, with the obvious intention to say something with reference to the cited work. Mike then mentioned links that people include in social media to research papers, and stated that it was unclear as to the reasons for including links, and what effect these links have, on the scholarly discourse. Mention was made of some research that had already been conducted in this area, with users of Mendeley. Also, bibliometrics people are starting to get engaged and bringing different methodologies to understand what is going on. The next subject concerns how altmetrics are measured. It was stated that decisions as to what was measured were pragmatic and technocratic. For example, Mendeley is included, but Zotero isn’t, and Colwiz isn’t. The reason stated for Zotero and Colwiz not being included was that these services do not have open APIs.  Other sources of altmetrics mentioned were twitter, github, Dryad, Facebook, blogs, usage data (sometimes), re-use of research objects data. It was also stated that altmetrics is mostly reliant on DOIs. Altmetrics has fostered startup activity including altmetric.com, plum analytic, grow kudos, www.impactstory.org. NISO is looking at standards in altmetrics ..."