Thing 23: Altmetrics – 23 Research Things (2017)

 Source: http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/23researchthings/2017/11/13/thing-23-altmetrics/

Thing 23: Altmetrics

Image: “altmetrics” by AJC1 via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The rise of Web 2.0 technologies is
linked to non-traditional scholarly publishing formats such as reports,
data sets, blogs, and outputs on other social media platforms. But how
do you track impact when traditional measures such as citation counts
don’t apply? Altmetrics to the rescue!

Getting Started

The term “altmetrics” (=alternative metrics) was coined in a tweet in 2010, and its development since then has gone from strength to strength, resulting in a manifesto. With no absolute definition the term can refer to

• impact
  measured on the basis of online activity, mined or gathered from online
  tools and social media (e.g. tweets, mentions, shares, links, downloads, clicks, views,  comments, ratings, followers and so on);
  
  
• metrics for alternative research outputs, for example citations to datasets;
• alternative ways of measuring research impact. 

Benefits of altmetrics include the fact that they can

• provide a faster method of accumulation than the more traditional citation-based metrics; 
• complement traditional citation-based metrics providing a more diverse range of research impact and engagement; 
• offer
  an opportunity to track the increasing availability of data,
  presentations, software, policy documents and other research outputs in
  the online environment.  

Below we introduce some of the tools available to University of Melbourne staff and students to start collecting altmetrics.

Altmetric Explorer

Altmetric Explorer
has been monitoring online sources since 2012, collating data from Web
of Science, Scopus, Mendeley, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn,
Wikipedia (English language), YouTube, public policy documents, blogs
and more. Altmetric Explorer uses a donut graphic to visually identify the type and quantity of attention a research output has received:

See more details

Blogged by 1

Tweeted by 32

On 30 Facebook pages

Referenced in 1 Wikipedia pages

Mentioned in 1 Google+ posts

18 readers on Mendeley

2 readers on CiteULike

The University of Melbourne Library’s subscription to Altmetric Explorer provides access to institutional data, as well as data for individual researchers and their outputs. Consider installing the Altmetric bookmarklet
on your toolbar to view Altmetric metrics for your publications. (Note:
this is only available for PubMed, arXiv or pages containing a DOI with
Google Scholar friendly citation metadata.)

PlumX Metrics

PlumX brings together research metrics for all types of scholarly research output, categorised as follows:  

• Usage: clicks, downloads, views, library holdings, video plays… 
• Captures: bookmarks, code forks, favorites, readers, watchers… 
• Mention: blog posts, comments, reviews, Wikipedia links, news media… 
• Social Media: tweets, Facebook likes, shares… 
• Citations: citation indexes (CrossRef/Scopus/Pubmed Central etc), patent citations, clinical citations, policy citations…

PlumX Metrics for individual articles, conference proceedings, book
chapters, and other resources, are available via the University of
Melbourne Library’s Discovery
search service – look for the Plum Print in the results list for your
search, and hover your cursor over it to expand details of the metrics:

Example of PlumX Metrics for an article retrieved through Discovery

Scopus
also displays PlumX Metrics for articles where available, offering an
interesting opportunity to view altmetrics alongside “traditional”
citation metrics,  and the Scopus field-weighted citation impact.

Impactstory

Impactstory is an
open source, web-based researcher profile that provides altmetrics to
help researchers measure and share the impacts of their research outputs
for traditional outputs (e.g. journal articles), as well as alternative
research outputs such as blog posts, datasets and software. Researchers
can register an Impactstory profile for free via their Twitter account,
then link other profiles such as ORCID and Google Scholar, as well as Pubmed IDs, DOIs, Webpage URLs, Slideshare and Github usernames. Impactstory
then provides an overview of the attention these connected collections
have received. Information from Impactstory can be exported for private
use. 




Have a look at this Impactstory example profile to find out more.

Public Library of Science – Article Level Metrics (PLOS ALMs)

If you publish research in the life sciences you can use PLOS ALMs to help guide understanding of the influence and impact of work before the accrual of academic citations.  

• All PLOS
  journal articles display PLOS ALMs – quantifiable measures that
  incorporate both academic and social metrics to document the many ways
  in which both scientists and the general public engage with published
  research.  
• PLOS ALMs are presented on the metrics tab on every published article. 
• Use ALM reports to guide you to the most important and influential work published. 

Minerva Access

The University of Melbourne’s institutional repository, Minerva Access,
allows research higher degree students and research staff to safely
promote and self-publish their research. There are a number of
incentives for including in the repository: 

• Minerva Access is harvested by Google Scholar, which in turn provides exposure and potential citation follow on
• Minerva
  Access provides usage statistics for each item in the Repository as
  well as each collection and sub-collection. See the left hand foot of
  each page and click on the Statistics icon/link to see data on the
  number of times each record has been viewed (and from which countries),
  and – if applicable – the number of times any associated PDF has been
  downloaded. Data is available by month and by year. 

Considerations

• Altmetrics have several advantages over traditional citation counts:
  they are quicker to accumulate, they document non-scholarly attention
  and influence, and they can be used to track the attention for
  non-traditional research outputs. However, they cannot tell anything
  about the quality of the research. You need both types of metrics –
  traditional and alternative – to get the full picture of research
  impact.
• Manual work is needed to assess the underlying qualitative data that makes up the metrics (who is saying what about research). 
• While
  altmetrics are good at indentifying ‘trending’ research, they have not
  yet been proven to be a good indicator for lasting, long-term impact. 
• Researchers
  seeking to evaluate non-English-language sources will find that
  altmetrics coverage is currently limitied for these outputs. 
  
  

Learn More

• For guidance around the tools, including useful summaries and tips, have a look at the University of Melbourne Library’s Altmetrics Subject Research Guide.
  
  
• The Altmetric Explorer website provides a range of case studies  of what researchers and institutions have used to track the societal attention to their research.
• In this blog post,
  Prof. Jonathan A. Eisen at the University of California, Davis,
  describes how he used Impactstory to look at the altmetrics of his
  research papers and data. 
• Dip into the readings of the PLOS Altmetrics Collection
  and gather understanding on the statistical analysis of altmetrics data
  sources, validation of models of scientific discovery and qualitative
  research describing discovery based on altmetrics. 
• The London School of Economics Impact Blog regularly runs features on Altmetrics.

This post was written by Georgina Binns (Faculty Librarian, VCA and MCM) and Fransie Naudé (Liaison Librarian, Education).

Thing 23: Altmetrics – 23 Research Things (2017)