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Do altmetrics point to the broader impact of research? An overview of benefits and disadvantages of altmetrics
Abstract
Today, it is not clear how the impact of research on other areas of society than science should be measured. While peer review and bibliometrics have become standard methods for measuring the impact of research in science, there is not yet an accepted framework within which to measure societal impact. Alternative metrics (called altmetrics to distinguish them from bibliometrics) are considered an interesting option for assessing the societal impact of research, as they offer new ways to measure (public) engagement with research output. Altmetrics is a term to describe web-based metrics for the impact of publications and other scholarly material by using data from social media platforms (e.g. Twitter or Mendeley). This overview of studies explores the potential of altmetrics for measuring societal impact. It deals with the definition and classification of altmetrics. Furthermore, their benefits and disadvantages for measuring impact are discussed.
... 2 Altmetrics has emerged as a practical alternative although it is an article-level metric that provides no information regarding the social or the scientific impact of a researcher. 3 Therefore, if these measures of impact are to complement the traditional bibliometrics, we propose that there should be an author-level Altmetrics that would reflect the real-time existence of a researcher since the records on the database are updated daily. ...
... 2 Altmetrics has emerged as a practical alternative although it is an article-level metric that provides no information regarding the social or the scientific impact of a researcher. 3 Therefore, if these measures of impact are to complement the traditional bibliometrics, we propose that there should be an author-level Altmetrics that would reflect the real-time existence of a researcher since the records on the database are updated daily. ...
... During the recent years, altmetric has emerged as an alternative measure of impact of research publications [39], [40], [41]. It tries to measure the activity around research articles in social media and academic social networks etc. [42]. ...
Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), published by Elsevier, is a prestigious peer reviewed journal that started in 1984. As on date of writing this article, the journal is in its 137th volume. Owing to its publication quality and continued academic standards, it has been indexed by major academic databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ etc. It is now ranked among the top journals in the area of Computer Science (General). Motivated by the long history, academic reputation and prestige of the journal, the present study attempts to do a bibliometric and text-based analysis of publications in the journal during the period of 1984-2020 (37 years). Bibliometric analysis helped to identify publishing and citation patterns, authorship and collaboration structure, funding patterns of the published research, open access and altmetric impact, gender distribution and SDG connections etc. The text-integrated path analysis helped in identifying the thematic structure and major concept evolution trajectories. The results of the analysis indicate that the FGCS journal is a high-quality research journal that has grown over time in terms of publications, citations and rankings. It publishes articles in specified thematic areas, with cloud, grid, IoT, Blockchain etc. found as the major themes addressed. Knowledge extension from cloud computing to multi-domain networks is witnessed and a divergence towards service function chains, distributed machine learning and edge computing systems is visible. The article thus presents very informative and useful insight about research publication trends in FGCS.
... Ravikumar (2018) stated that though the altmetric variables are nascent, the new media tools are penetrating the traditional citation area, which was considered the tool for evaluating scientific literature. Bornmann (2014), Robinson-García et al. (2014), Roemer and Borchardt (2015) and Williams (2017) also discussed the effectiveness of altmetric tools as an impact assessment tool from different angles. ...
In this paper, the correlation of the citation count and Mendeley readership score of the articles by the Sri Lankan authors was studied. The study presents how the correlation exists among different Web of Science (WoS) subject categories and in different Mendeley user categories. Nine thousand one hundred thirty articles of Sri Lankan authors are collected from the WoS database, with a minimum of 5 citation counts, and analyzed to trace their correlation with Mendeley readership from different aspects. Quantitative methods were applied in the study. A strong correlation exists between the citation count and Mendeley readership. 'Chemistry', 'Public, Environmental & Occupational Health' and 'Engineering' were observed as the highly indexed subjects in the category-wise analysis, though it does not affect the readership and citation. Subjects with a higher Mendeley readership score strongly correlate with a citation in different user categories, and articles with less than 200 readership scores mostly tend to show a negative correlation. Mendeley is more prevalent among researchers, Ph.D. students and master's students than in other user categories, and in all the user categories, correlation is more or less favourable.
... Altmetrics, articulated by Priem et al. (2010) and a group of scientists, uses data from the social web to track and quantify interactions and is proposed as complementary to citation-based metrics. Studies in the past have investigated the use of Altmetrics, and it is noted to be a very useful tool for informing scholarship (Bornmann, 2014(Bornmann, , 2015. Altmetrics Attention Score (AAS) used in the study is defined as the weighted count of all the online attention found for individual research output. ...
In response to the global challenge of climate change, 136 countries accounting for 90% of global GDP and 85% of the population have now set net-zero targets. A transition to net-zero will require the decarbonization of all sectors of the economy. Green-hydrogen produced from renewable energy sources poses little to no threat to the environment and increasing its production will support net-zero targets Our study examined the evolution of green-hydrogen research themes since the UN Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015 by utilizing bibliographic couplings, keyword co-occurrence, and keyphrase analysis of 642 articles from 2016 to 2021 in the Scopus database. We studied bibliometrics indicators and temporal evolution of publications and citations, patterns of open access, the effect of author collaboration, influential publications, and top contributing countries. We also consider new indicators like publication views, keyphrases, topics with prominence and field weighted citation impact, and Altmetrics to understand the research direction further. We find four major thematic distributions of green-hydrogen research based on keyword co-occurrence networks: hydrogen storage, hydrogen production, electrolysis, and the hydrogen economy. We also find networks of four research clusters that provide new information on the journal’s contributions to green-hydrogen research. These are materials chemistry, hydrogen energy and cleaner production, applied energy, and fuel cells. Most green-hydrogen research aligns with Affordable and Clean Energy (SDG 7) and Climate Action (SDG 13). The outcomes of policy decisions in the United States, Europe, India, and China will profoundly impact green-hydrogen production and storage over the next five years. If these policies are implemented, these countries will account for two-thirds of this growth. Asia will account for the most significant part and become the second-largest producer globally.
... Nacidas como crítica y alternativa a los indicadores de citación tradicionales (Priem et al., 2010;Torres-Salinas, Cabezas-Clavijo y Jiménez-Contreras, 2013), las altmétricas o altmetrics se definieron originariamente como «el estudio y uso de medidas de impacto académico basado en la actividad en herramientas y medios electrónicos en línea» 1 (Priem, 2014: 266). Una definición un tanto ambigua que levantó las expectativas de muchos, viendo en ella una vía para cuantificar el impacto social de los trabajos académicos de manera rápida y sencilla (Bornmann, 2014;Haustein, 2016). Asimismo, despertó un gran interés comercial, con grandes editoriales comprando y comercializando productos y proveedores de altmétricas. ...
Este libro ofrece un análisis integrado de la sociología española como disciplina científica y profesional organizada para la producción de saber sobre la sociedad. Se presenta como una panorámica de la situación de la sociología española en algunos aspectos transversales que moldean y, en algunas ocasiones, determinan las características, condicionantes y líneas de futuro de la disciplina sociológica.
El libro reúne dieciocho contribuciones organizadas en seis partes temáticas que abarcan la historia institucional, los rasgos cognitivos, la universidad, la profesión, la producción científica y la presencia social. La aproximación a estos temas, novedosa en muchas de sus facetas, ha requerido la revisión y actualización de una extensa documentación, así como la recopilación y análisis sistemático de datos de diversa índole, estructurados en varios componentes metodológicos: fuentes, registros y legislación sobre el ámbito universitario; estadísticas oficiales del INE y del Sistema de Información Universitario; consultas a instituciones científicas y profesionales de la sociología; encuesta online a profesionales de la sociología; datos bibliométricos sobre la producción científica y las especialidades; e información sobre la presencia de la sociología en los grandes medios de prensa escrita y online.
Este trabajo se ha afrontado como tarea colectiva y colaborativa entre instituciones y equipos: es iniciativa de la Federación Española de Sociología con motivo de la conmemoración de su 40 aniversario. Ha contado con la colaboración del Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, a la que se han sumado varias instituciones y personas que han ido dando forma a los temas que, por primera vez, aparecen reunidos en una misma obra.
... The existing indexing techniques incorporate limited scholastic features; hence, they are susceptible to incompleteness and disparity. The concept of altmetrics helps in measuring a broader influence of scholars by incorporating a variety of scientific and social features from different web platforms, social media posts, blogs, press releases and online articles [14,67]. Though altmetrics are gaining immense attention, they are constrained by platform or source reliability [16,17,44]. ...
Identifying and recommending influential scholars is one of the leading applications of scholarly data analytic. The existing methods to identify influential scholars focus on scholastic influence or social collaborations. In the former approach, scholar’s scientific productivity is anatomized, whereas in the latter one, scholar’s collaborations are analyzed. To accurately measure a comprehensive influence of a scholar, it is essential to combine scholastic influence and social collaborations. The purpose of this research is to develop a recommender system, ScholarRec, which combines scholastic influence and social collaborations; hence, accurately and comprehensively identifies influential scholars from Academic Social Networks (ASNs). To measure scholastic influence, apart from scientific productivity, ScholarRec incorporates scholar’s active engagement in information propagation and knowledge dissemination. To measure the degree of social collaborations, ScholarRec explores follower and following connections among scholars instead of traditional co-author and co-citation relations. The performance of ScholarRec is evaluated on two well-known ASNs, ResearchGate (RG) and Academia. User demographic features demonstrating scholar’s scholastic and social contributions are collected for a set of scholars. To identify the significance of each feature included in ScholarRec, a weighting scheme is developed. It assigns an appropriate weight to each feature based on its significance in influence calculation. The weighted features help in generating unique ranks to influential scholars. The developed weight assignment technique also makes ScholarRec applicable to different ASNs with diverse features. The results reveal that ScholarRec accurately identifies and uniquely recommends influential scholars for RG and Academia.
In current times, much stress is being laid on the evaluation of research productivity of researchers or faculty in addition to the academic qualifications and experience for the purposes of recruitment, promotion, and research grant funding. Over the years, several quantitative indices have been devised for this purpose. Some of these indices such as h-index, impact factor and e-index are being extensively used by research organizations, universities, accreditation bodies and funding agencies for basic scientists as well as health professionals. In the absence of any formal training, these parameters or their advantages and shortcomings may not be well understood by the health professionals, especially in the early stages of their careers and sometimes, even by the evaluators. A big unanswered question is the validity of the same criteria for health professionals as are applicable for the basic science researchers. Since health professional undertaking research assignments are neither adequately trained in basic research nor can they comprehend these indices well, the same yardstick to evaluate these two widely different groups of researchers often places the health professionals at a disadvantage.This paper aims to highlight certain vital issues related to the application of research productivity indicators for recruitment and career progression of health care professionals.
Altmetrics is an emerging method for observing academic communication. Many researchers have explored the relationships between altmetric counts and citations through correlation analysis, but there is no consistent result. The varied results may come from the divergence of data sources, disciplinary differences, and the characteristics of data distribution. To reduce the influence of the interfering factors above, the Co-occurrence analysis was proposed in this study as the method to explore the relationships between citations and altmetric counts. We observe the overlap between the highly-cited papers and the high altmetric count papers, alongside with the coverage of each collection from various altmetric sources in different academic fields. The results show that Mendeley has the highest correlation with citations among all the altmetric sources in the five academic fields, and might be the only one having the opportunity to be an indicator for academic evaluation. The other altmetric counts from different sources do not show strong relationships with citations in general.
In this paper an analysis of the presence and possibilities of altmetrics for bibliometric and performance analysis is carried out. Using the web based tool Impact Story, we have collected metrics for 20,000 random publications from the Web of Science. We studied the presence and frequency of altmetrics in the set of publications, across fields, document types and also through the years. The main result of the study is that less than 50% of the publications have some kind of altmetrics. The source that provides most metrics is Mendeley, with metrics on readerships for around 37% of all the publications studied. Other sources only provide marginal information. Possibilities and limitations of these indicators are discussed and future research lines are outlined. We also assessed the accuracy of the data retrieved through Impact Story by focusing on the analysis of the accuracy of data from Mendeley; in a follow up study, the accuracy and validity of other data sources not included here will be assessed.
Many people involved in the scholarly communications process – from academics, students, and researchers, to publishers, librarians, and learners – are participating in a dynamic digital context now more than ever; moreover, digital acts of communication and dissemination of scholarship leave traces of impact that can now be culled and quantified. Altmetrics, metrics based on the social web, provide an opportunity both to more acutely measure the propagation of this communication and to reconsider how we measure research impact in general. While the use of social media and analytics and the structure of tenure and promotion practices are not consistent across or even within disciplines, the practices and experimentation of early adopters, from researchers and institutions to industry, yield stories, lessons learned, and practices worth investigating. Researchers and academic librarians both face new opportunities to engage and support the use of altmetrics tools and methods and to re-examine how scholarship is defined, collected, preserved, used, and discussed. This report summarizes the major trends, opportunities and challenges of altmetrics to both researchers and academic research libraries and outlines ways in which research libraries can participate in shaping this emergent field. Also featured in this article is a micro-case study featuring a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh and Plum Analytics that illustrates how libraries can begin to map out their role on campus in this arena.
Aimed at academics, academic managers and administrators, professionals in scientometrics, information scientists and science policy makers at all levels. This book reviews the principles, methods and indicators of scientometric evaluation of information processes in science and assessment of the publication activity of individuals, teams, institutes and countries. It provides scientists, science officers, librarians and students with basic and advanced knowledge on evaluative scientometrics. Especially great stress is laid on the methods applicable in practice and on the clarification of quantitative aspects of impact of scientific publications measured by citation indicators.
