Presented at the "Altmetrics - Present and Future" Panel at the ASIST Annual Meeting in Montreal on November 5, 2013

1. Altmetrics
Judit Bar-Ilan
Department of Information Science
Bar-Ilan University, Israel

2. Scientific revolution in scientometrics?
• Taxonomic change: not only impact on
science, but also on society (Bornmann, 2013)
• “altmetrics will play a significant role in
measuring societal impact”(Bornmann, 2013
in the SIGMETRICS list)
• Scientific revolution or not, bibliometricians
start to take altmetrics into account
– Altmetric indicators can measure (at least
partially) societal impact

3. Altmetrics – recent achievements
• Altmetric tools
– ImpactStory, Altmetric, Plum Analytics
• Publishers add altmetrics to their site
– PLoS ALM, BMJ
• Post-publication peer-review
– F1000, PubMed, ResearchBlogging
• Studies showing the value of Mendeley
readership counts
– Significant, medium strength correlations with citation
counts
– Seems to be one of the most promising altmetric
indicators

4. Achievements + Interest ->
Responsibility
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What to measure?
What is the meaning of the measurements?
How to measure?
What is the quality of the underlying data?

5. What & how to measure?
• Usage
– Multiple copies
• Popularity
– Tweets are ephemeral
– Shares
• Discussions
– Sentiments
– Different venues
• Not only scholarly peer-reviewed publications
– Books, reports, datasets, applications, software,
presentations, videos, ….

6. What is the meaning of these
measures?
• Why do users download an article? How are
“views” related to “downloads”?
• Why do they share a link?
• Why do they make use of a dataset?
• Who are the users?
• …
• Note
– Quite easy to “game” the measures
– No gatekeepers
– The “wisdom of crowds”

7. Data sources
• Twitter
– “Big data”
– Feeds are not comprehensive
– Difficult to monitor
– Even more problematic to reach “historical data”
– Tweets archived at the Library of Congress

8. Reference managers
• Are they here to stay?
– Connotea, 2collab
– Most popular today:
• Mendeley, CiteULike
• Zotero – data are not aggregated
• Is altmetric analysis high on their list of priorites?
• Data quality
– Entered by users
• Accuracy, multiple records
– Author names

9. There is a lot to be done !
Good luck!!!