In the field of scholarly publishing, the importance of a particular work has historically been measured by the number of times it is cited by other articles, known as citation impact. As scholarly work is increasingly shared and discussed online, we’ve seen the emergency of altmetrics: an alternative method of measuring the impact of academic works using web data. Altmetrics considers not only number of citations, but also other factors that indicate impact, including number of views or downloads and mentions in social media or news (known as social engagement data). According to altmetrics, this means that each time someone mentions a particular article on Twitter or Facebook, for example, the overall impact of that article is believed to increase. The logic (which makes sense to me), is that the more that people are talking about and sharing something, the more influential it is.
The issue of determining scholarly impact will be of interest to many academic librarians, especially anyone who works in the field of scholarly communications. Altmetrics is also worth exploring for librarians and other information professionals working outside of academic libraries, because altmetrics can also be used to measure the impact of individual people, organizations, videos, websites and more.
A few months ago, I came across Altmetric.com‘s list of 2014’s Top 100 academic papers online. The list aggregates the papers that received the most attention online and then ranks them, using article-level metrics (ALM). It’s fascinating to see the different places that the papers were mentioned, and how many times. As social media becomes an increasingly major way that people consume and share news and information, I think it’s entirely appropriate that the impact of an article take into consideration its spread on social media.
According to Altmetric.com, the top paper of the year was “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.” The article presents the results of an experiment the researchers conducted to demonstrate that Facebook users’ moods can be manipulated by adjusting what types of stories (uplifting, depressing, etc.) appear in their news feeds. I definitely remember hearing about this article multiple times through my own social media channels. The article was mentioned in:
- 301 news stories
- 130 blog posts (make that 131!)
- 3,801 tweets
- 10 peer reviews
- 342 Facebook posts
- 115 Google+ posts
- 14 Reddit posts
Altmetrics is a fascinating new field that will likely grow more important in coming years. Librarians should consider the ways that they can use altmetrics to measure the impact of their own work, the work of faculty members, and perhaps the impact and use of library collections, particularly content available in open access institutional repositories like UBC’s cIRcle.
Great post, Liz. I researched and wrote the for UBC Library and you are right. This is a field that’s expanding exponentially in how it’s being used in measuring impact and the amount of research being done to evaluate how effective it is.
One element that struck me is that altmetrics is supposed to be complementary rather than alternative to traditional article-level metrics like journal impact factor. The fact that altmetrics is talked about as an alternative may be because the concept is such a new kid on the block that a clear narrative has not been established.
Hey,
Thanks for the link to the Altmetrics Guide. That would actually have come in handy while I was writing this post!
Also, I think that you’re right: it might be better to think about altmetrics as complementary to traditional article-level metrics rather than an alternative. There’s no reason why both can’t be used.