Archives des mots-clés : Altmetrics

Altmetrics and societal impact measurements: Match or mismatch? A literature review

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Authors : Iman Tahamtan, Lutz Bornmann

Can alternative metrics (altmetrics) data be used to measure societal impact? We wrote this literature overview of empirical studies in order to find an answer to this question. The overview includes two parts.

The first part, “societal impact measurements”, explains possible methods and problems in measuring the societal impact of research, case studies for societal impact measurement, societal impact considerations at funding organizations, and the societal problems that should be solved by science.

The second part of the review, “altmetrics”, addresses a major question in research evaluation, which is whether altmetrics are proper indicators for measuring the societal impact of research. In the second part we explain the data sources used for altmetrics studies and the importance of field-normalized indicators for impact measurements.

This review indicates that it should be relevant for impact measurements to be oriented towards pressing societal problems. Case studies in which societal impact of certain pieces of research is explained seem to provide a legitimate method for measuring societal impact.

In the use of altmetrics, field-specific differences should be considered by applying field normalization (in cross-field comparisons). Altmetrics data such as social media counts might mainly reflect the public interest and discussion of scholarly works rather than their societal impact.

Altmetrics (Twitter data) might be especially fruitfully employed for research evaluation purposes, if they are used in the context of network approaches. Conclusions based on altmetrics data in research evaluation should be drawn with caution.

URL : Altmetrics and societal impact measurements: Match or mismatch? A literature review

Original location : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2020.ene.02

How much research shared on Facebook is hidden from public view? A comparison of public and private online activity around PLOS ONE papers

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Authors : Asura Enkhbayar, Stefanie Haustein, Germana Barata, Juan Pablo Alperin

Despite its undisputed position as the biggest social media platform, Facebook has never entered the main stage of altmetrics research. In this study, we argue that the lack of attention by altmetrics researchers is not due to a lack of relevant activity on the platform, but because of the challenges in collecting Facebook data have been limited to activity that takes place in a select group of public pages and groups.

We present a new method of collecting shares, reactions, and comments across the platform-including private timelines-and use it to gather data for all articles published between 2015 to 2017 in the journal PLOS ONE.

We compare the gathered data with altmetrics collected and aggregated by Altmetric. The results show that 58.7% of papers shared on the platform happen outside of public view and that, when collecting all shares, the volume of activity approximates patterns of engagement previously only observed for Twitter.

Both results suggest that the role and impact of Facebook as a medium for science and scholarly communication has been underestimated. Furthermore, they emphasise the importance of openness and transparency around the collection and aggregation of altmetrics.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01476

Share or perish: Social media and the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing

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Authors : Paul McNamara, Kim Usher

The impact of published research is sometimes measured by the number of citations an individual article accumulates. However, the time from publication to citation can be extensive. Years may pass before authors are able to measure the impact of their publication. Social media provides individuals and organizations a powerful medium with which to share information.

The power of social media is sometimes harnessed to share scholarly works, especially journal article citations and quotes. A non‐traditional bibliometric is required to understand the impact social media has on disseminating scholarly works/research.

The International Journal of Mental Health Nursing (IJMHN) appointed a social media editor as of 1 January 2017 to implement a strategy to increase the impact and reach of the journal’s articles.

To measure the impact of the IJMHN social media strategy, quantitative data for the eighteen months prior to the social media editor start date, and the eighteen months after that date (i.e.: from 01 July 2015 to 30 June 2018) were acquired and analysed.

Quantitative evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of one journal’s social media strategy in increasing the reach and readership of the articles it publishes.

This information may be of interest to those considering where to publish their research, those wanting to amplify the reach of their research, those who fund research, and journal editors and boards.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12600

The effect of bioRxiv preprints on citations and altmetrics

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Authors : Nicholas Fraser, Fakhri Momeni, Philipp Mayr, Isabella Peters

A potential motivation for scientists to deposit their scientific work as preprints is to enhance its citation or social impact, an effect which has been empirically observed for preprints in physics, astronomy and mathematics deposited to arXiv. In this study we assessed the citation and altmetric advantage of bioRxiv, a preprint server for the biological sciences.

We retrieved metadata of all bioRxiv preprints deposited between November 2013 and December 2017, and matched them to articles that were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. Citation data from Scopus and altmetric data from Altmetric.com were used to compare citation and online sharing behaviour of bioRxiv preprints, their related journal articles, and non-deposited articles published in the same journals.

We found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles received a sizeable citation and altmetric advantage over non-deposited articles. Regression analysis reveals that this advantage is not explained by multiple explanatory variables related to the article and its authorship.

bioRxiv preprints themselves are being directly cited in journal articles, regardless of whether the preprint has been subsequently published in a journal. bioRxiv preprints are also shared widely on Twitter and in blogs, but remain relatively scarce in mainstream media and Wikipedia articles, in comparison to peer-reviewed journal articles.

URL : https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/673665v1

Aligning Social Media Indicators with the Documents in an Open Access Repository

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Authors: Luis Meneses, Alyssa Arbuckle, Hector Lopez, Belaid Moa, Richard Furuta, Ray Siemens

In this paper we describe our current efforts towards building a framework that extends the functionality of an Open Access Repository by implementing processes to incorporate the ongoing trends in social media into the context of a digital collection.

We refer to these processes collectively as the Social Media Engine. The purpose of our framework is twofold: first, we propose to challenge some of the preconceived notions of digital libraries by making repositories more dynamic; and second, by challenging this notion we want to promote public engagement and open scholarship.

As a work in progress, we believe that a real challenge lies in investigating the implications that these two points introduce within the context of the humanities.

URL : Aligning Social Media Indicators with the Documents in an Open Access Repository

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.44

Do altmetrics work for assessing research quality?

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Authors : Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese, Paolo Ciancarini, Aldo Gangemi, Silvio Peroni, Francesco Poggi, Valentina Presutti

Alternative metrics (aka altmetrics) are gaining increasing interest in the scientometrics community as they can capture both the volume and quality of attention that a research work receives online.

Nevertheless, there is limited knowledge about their effectiveness as a mean for measuring the impact of research if compared to traditional citation-based indicators.

This work aims at rigorously investigating if any correlation exists among indicators, either traditional (i.e. citation count and h-index) or alternative (i.e. altmetrics) and which of them may be effective for evaluating scholars.

The study is based on the analysis of real data coming from the National Scientific Qualification procedure held in Italy by committees of peers on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11813

The insoluble problems of books: What does Altmetric.com have to offer?

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Authors : Daniel Torres-Salinas, Juan Gorraiz, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the capabilities, functionalities and appropriateness of Altmetric.com as a data source for the bibliometric analysis of books in comparison to PlumX.

We perform an exploratory analysis on the metrics the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions platform offers for books. We use two distinct datasets of books: the Book Collection included in Altmetric.com and the Clarivate’s Master Book List, to analyze Altmetric.com’s capabilities to download and merge data with external databases.

Finally, we compare our findings with those obtained in a previous study performed in PlumX. Altmetric.com combines and orderly tracks a set of data sources combined by DOI identifiers to retrieve metadata from books, being Google Books its main provider. It also retrieves information from commercial publishers and from some Open Access initiatives, including those led by university libraries such as Harvard Library.

We find issues with linkages between records and mentions or ISBN discrepancies. Furthermore, we find that automatic bots affect greatly Wikipedia mentions to books. Our comparison with PlumX suggests that none of these tools provide a complete picture of the social attention generated by books and are rather complementary than comparable tools.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10128