Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 2013, 8.

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

EBL 101

Research Methods: Altmetrics

Virginia Wilson
Librarian, Murray Library
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Email: [email protected]

Received: 3 Feb. 2013 Accepted: 8 Feb. 2013

2013 Wilson. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons-Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike License 2.5 Canada (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/), which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.

It’s no secret that scholarly communication is lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero–where

changing. The internet, the open access we can see and count it. That hallway
movement, the proliferation of institutional conversation about a recent finding has moved
repositories, and the use of social networking to blogs and social networks – now, we can
tools, as well as the questioning of peer review listen in. The local genomics dataset has
and impact factors, to name just a few things, moved to an online repository – now, we can
have altered the scholarly publication track it. This diverse group of activities forms a
landscape. Massive amounts of research composite trace of impact far richer than any
content, both full content and citations are available before. We call the elements of this
available on the internet: the traditional trace altmetrics.”
research paper, blogs, academic repositories, (http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/)
online citation managers, and even tweets and
Facebook posts. If the accepted ways of Based on these alternative metrics, altmetrics is
publishing are changing, then it makes sense “the creation and study of new metrics based
that different ways of measurement should be on the Social Web for analyzing, and
explored in order to get the complete picture of informing scholarship” (altmetrics.org). What
the impact of the work. This is where paths do our reactions to a particular article
altmetrics comes in and it’s exciting stuff! take in the social web? PLoS refers to this new
landscape as the “scholarly ecosystem”
The Altmetrics Manifesto states that scholars (http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/alt-
are increasingly moving their work to the metrics/). Altmetrics isn’t just about traditional
internet. “These new forms [citation managers, citation-based indicators. Nor is it just about
blogs, other social sharing sites] reflect and hits; these can be inflated by robot-crawlers
transmit scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but and other zealous clickers. So work has been
uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now done on finessing use stats and hit count work

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in order to get a more meaningful measure of bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArtic

online usage in all its variety. As an emerging le/2874/2570
field of scholarship and development,  Roemer, R.C. & Borchardt, R. (2012).
altmetrics is moving ahead in leaps and From bibliometrics to altmetrics: A
bounds. It is becoming common to see journal changing scholarly landscape. College
publishers and repositories implementing tools & Research Libraries News vol. 73 no. 10
that will let authors see the impact of their 596-600 Retrieved from
scholarly publications. http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/10/596.f
ull
And of course there is a role for librarians and
information professionals to play in this new Altmetrics Scholarship
field of measurement. While new, the
altmetrics field is exploding with new ideas  PLoS Altmeterics Collections
and products. A librarian’s expertise in http://www.ploscollections.org/article/
scholarly communication and in finding the browseIssue.action?issue=info:doi/10.1
resources and data needed for researching 371/issue.pcol.v02.i19
scholars can be invaluable to the institution.  The Altmetrics Group on Mendeley
There is much to learn in this emerging field. http://www.mendeley.com/groups/586
I’ve included a list of resources that can take 171/altmetrics/ Here you can find more
you further into the realm of altmetrics, and as scholarly articles on altmetrics added
always, I appreciate comments on this column. by Mendeley users.
You can log in as a reader to the EBLIP journal
and interact from there. Products1:

The Altmetrics Manifesto  Altmetric It

http://www.altmetric.com/ They offer
 Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P. & open data for individuals, including a
Neylon, C. (2010), Altmetrics: A free bookmarklet to be used on recent
manifesto, (v.1.0), 26 October 2010. scholarly articles to see how much
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto (The attention they have received online.
comments at the end of the manifesto There is also an API, free for non-
are an interesting conversation as the commercial use, used to mash up
concept of altmetrics develops.) altmetrics data with other data. The
following link is for an interesting blog
Articles post from altmetric.org on the free
services and APPs they’ve developed
 Taraborelli, D. 2008. Soft peer review: for libraries and institutional
Social software and distributed repositories:
scientific evaluation. Retrieved from http://altmetric.com/blog/altmetrics-in-
http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/8279/ academic-libraries-and-institutional-
 Neylon C. & Wu S (2009) Article-level repositories/
metrics and the evolution of scientific  ImpactStory (formerly Total-Impact)
impact. PLoS Biol 7(11): e1000242. http://impactstory.org/ An altmetric
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242 aggregator. In terms of pricing, this
Retrieved from information is from the website: We
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/inf charge to collect metrics; the data is free
o:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242
 Priem, J. & Hemminger, B.M. (2010). 1The author is not affiliated with and does not
Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new
endorse any organization represented here.
metrics of scholarly impact on the
They are included for information purposes
social Web. First Monday, 15(7)
only and are to be implemented at the user’s
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/
own discretion.
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and open once it’s been collected. You let social media sites such as Twitter and
us know to start collecting metrics on Facebook, mainstream media, and
something when you register it with us. reference managers such as
The first 1000 items you register are free. Mendeley,to illustrate how scholarly
Registering more than 1000 items will articles are being used beyond
have an annual fee to provide academia” (2012).
sustainability for our nonprofit service  PLoS Article-Level-Metrics (ALMs)
(waivers available in some cases); the fee http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/
will depend on how many items you'd like Metrics are tracked for every article
to register. published by PLoS and the full ALM
 Plum Analytics data set, which is updated monthly as
http://www.plumanalytics.com/index. a .csv file, is always freely available
html This company collects impact online for all PLoS-published articles.
metrics in five major categories: usage,  ScienceCard
captures, mentions, social media, and http://sciencecard.org/ ScienceCard is a
citations. One of the two founders of web-service that collects article-level
this service is a librarian. They gather metrics using the content from Twitter,
metrics about what they refer to as Mendeley, PubMed Central,
“artifacts” and these include: articles, CiteULike, Wikipedia and CrossRef.
book chapters, books, clinical trials, Other services continue to be added.
datasets, figures, grants, patents,
presentations, source code, and videos.
You can see the metrics they include References
and where they find them here:
http://www.plumanalytics.com/metric altmetrics.org. (2010). Altmetrics. Retrieved
s.html from http://altmetrics.org/about/
 Altmetric for Scopus
http://altmetric.uservoice.com/knowle Koufogiannakis, D. (2012). Altmetrics for
dgebase/articles/83246-altmetric-for- Scopus. Collections information.
scopus Denise Koufogiannakis Retrieved from
explains on her blog that “the altmetric http://collectionsinfo.blogspot.ca/2012/
service will capture information from 09/altmetric-for-scopus.html?spref=tw

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