Altmetrics for Research
Evaluation
Iara Vidal Pereira de Souza (@iaravps)
PhD Student, non-practicing Librarian
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

Summary
What are altmetrics?
What do they mean for research evaluation?
What are the relationships between altmetrics
and openness?

What are altmetrics?
A field: “The creation and study of new metrics based
on the Social Web for analyzing and informing
scholarship” (from altmetrics.org/about/)
A measure: “a social web indicator of an aspect of
the value of academic articles” (from M. Thelwall & N.
Maflahi, 2015, doi:10.1002/asi.23252)

Altmetrics: a manifesto / J. Priem, D.
Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010)
Scholarship’s main filters for importance – peer
review, citation counts, journal impact factor – are
failing.
Social Web allows us to follow uses that are invisible
to traditional metrics
Paper collections go from drawers to online reference
managers, like Mendeley/Zotero;
Conversations and debates now also happen on Twitter,
blogs, Facebook...
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

Altmetrics providers
What they all have in common: output-level metrics from lots of
different sources – including traditional ones (citations) and others
not related to social media (media outlets, grey literature)

Altmetrics and Research Evaluation: Promise
Go beyond citations and track other impact “flavors”
Go beyond academia and track impact over different
audiences
Go beyond the article and track multiple sources

Altmetrics and Research Evaluation: Reality
Some funding agencies are already using altmetrics to
support their strategies
Wellcome Trust (UK) is one of them (see A. Dinsmore, L.
Allen, K. Dolby, 2014, doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002003)
Lack of identifiers makes it hard to get impact data, so many
studies still focus on altmetrics as a way to predict journal
article citations
But progress is coming: see Depsy, a tool for tracking
research software impact from the makers of ImpactStory

But what about openness?
Altmetrics can help open outputs shine (R. Mounce,
2013, doi:10.1002/bult.2013.1720390406)
This can be true not only for OA articles and
repositories, but also for open data and OER
The Open Access citation advantage is also observed
with alternative metrics – open wins again!

Altmetrics are open! ... Aren’t they?
According to the manifesto, yes: “They’re open – not
just the data, but the scripts and algorithms that
collect and interpret it.”
But many sources for altmetric data are closed. Some
have APIs (Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook…); others
don’t even have that (Google Scholar, anyone?)

So why do I care about altmetrics...
Focus on the alt: not just alternative metrics,
outputs, audiences, but also:
Alternative scholars (J.P. Alperin, 2013,
doi:10.1002/bult.2013.1720390407): shine a light on
research from the periphery
And an alternative way to do research evaluation!
Altmetrics are DIVERSE. It is not a single thing with
a single meaning. And impact is diverse too. It can
have lots of different flavors.

... And why I think you should care too!
More important than altmetrics themselves is
the approach to research evaluation implicit in
them:
Granularity: judge works by their own merits,
not by where they were published.
Variety: not one metric to rule them all, but a
fellowship of metrics!

Want to know more?
Search for #altmetrics on Twitter
Follow projects that try to create standards
Altmetrics Initiative, lead by the US National Information
Standards Organization – NISO
(http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/)
CrossRef’s DOI Event Tracker Pilot
(http://det.labs.crossref.org/)
Take a look at the PLOS Altmetrics Collection

Thank you!
iaravidalps@gmail.com
iaravps.wordpress.com
@iaravps