“Altmetrics” and Some New Tools for Faculty Authors

At the end of the Fall 2013 semester, I had the opportunity to address a small working group of faculty who share a common research interest, and are as such, likely to publish articles or other materials related to the work and exploration they do.

My goal was to impart a term for an emerging practice that is being used to gain perspective about the reach one’s own work is having. This new term is “Altmetrics.” I also wanted to offer up a tool that can be used by authors to harness these Altmetrics, and another that can help authors distinguish themselves from other researchers who may have the same or a similar name.

First, an explanation: You likely already know that traditionally, when academics try to determine the degree to which their work is being read and used, the “splash” their work is making, they have commonly used two tools. The first is the citation count; literally, a count of how many times a given paper has appeared in the bibliographies of other articles. The second is the impact factor of the journal that published their paper. Impact factor is very similar to citation count, except it is a measure of the number of times any articles recently published within a certain journal are cited; i.e. how frequently articles published in the journal Pediatrics are cited, regardless of who wrote them.  This journal-level citation count is regarded as a measure of the esteem in which the journal is held. If articles published in a given journal are cited frequently and widely, the journal is considered to have a high impact factor. The higher the impact factor, the more prestigious it is to have one’s paper published within.

These tools are commonly referred to as “metrics.”

What is limiting about these traditional metrics is the fact that they do not take into account the many new ways in which conversation occurs around an article or idea in today’s increasingly online- and socially-oriented landscape, nor do they “work” for all of the various types of scholarly output that exist.

At one time, the go-to place to find academic discussion was within the pages of the journals in the field. Today, scholars are also posting their thoughts online; and not merely about what they ate for lunch, but rather about the research of a peer in the field, or about an article that they found interesting. Conference attendees blog, tweet, and retweet in real-time about influential keynote talks. Articles are “liked”, read, “favorited”, saved, etc. on various social media outlets; both academically focused, and not. Scholars create and make available such items as data sets and software programs. It is logical to assume that such research products are used; but where would the use of these be cited if the subsequent research products do not take the form of published journal articles? Where is the quantifiable or tangible evidence?

This is what Altmetrics seeks to reveal: the uses, mentions, and other evidence of influence that traditional metrics do not take into account.

I recently attended a conference where I heard a librarian and faculty member duo from Wellesley College discuss how beneficial the perspective revealed by Altmetrics can be. Adele Wolfson teaches chemistry, but as someone who publishes in the area of pedagogical research, as opposed to chemistry lab-based research, the true reach of her scholarly output was not being accurately reflected via traditional metrics. She and her librarian colleagues took a look at the various outlets Altmetrics explores and captured a much more robust body of usage, and an arguably more accurate depiction of Wolfson’s reach. You can read more about the team’s foray into Altmetrics in this brief news item and get the whole story in the full article, which happens to be freely available from Wellesley College’s Institutional Repository.

Even if you are not planning to publish any scholarly work in the near future, be sure to check the following resources out: they will help you to get “in the know” about what is out there, and they’re free!

Altmetrics | http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/ 

An explanation of why and how Altmetrics are being used to measure scholarly impact in the changing and diversifying online environment. 

ImpactStory | http://impactstory.org/

Create a profile of your own to capture the “bigger picture” impact your work is making in your field.

ORCID| http://orcid.org/

Create (and then be sure to use) a unique identifier that you can include when publishing future works to help disambiguate yourself from other researchers and authors with names similar to your own; use it to connect your past/future works to yourself after a name change.

And as always, if you have any questions about getting started with Altmetrics, scholarly publishing, author rights, etc., please do not hesitate to contact me at em.lipin@assumption.edu or x7136: it’s what I’m here for!