Altmetrics: What, Where, Why? by Catherine Chimes Head of Marketing & Customer Relations Altmetric LLP
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ARTICLE Altmetrics ARTICLE Altmetrics: What, Where, Why? By Catherine Chimes Head of Marketing & Customer Relations Altmetric LLP Altmetrics have become a buzzword in scholarly altmetrics data add a new layer of insight into the publishing in the last year. But just what is all the attention and societal impact the work has gar- fuss about? nered. As evaluation criteria expand and budgets tight- By providing both qualitative and quantitative en, authors, publishers, universities, and research data for a paper, altmetrics can help authors and bodies are increasingly looking for additional ways publishers explore, understand, and engage in to demonstrate the reach and value of their work. the conversations that are going on around the Traditional measures of scholarly impact, such as research. This can be used to help influence fu- the Impact Factor, tend to focus only at the jour- ture publications or research, and serves to further nal level—with little insight into how the individ- stimulate the academic discussion. ual articles within a publication perform. Recent advancements have therefore seen new measures emerge, which take a more granular view of the dissemination of articles and associ- ated research content. Commonly referred to as The task of tracking and reporting on an indi- altmetrics, or alternative metrics, these new forms vidual scholarly article is not without obstacles— of measurement look beyond citation and pub- not least the need to disambiguate between differ- lisher usage counts, with a focus on online “men- ent versions of a single piece of work. In order to tions” of a research work. By collating data from do this with accuracy, at Altmetric, data collation sources, such as social media, blogs, news outlets, is based on a scholarly identifier unique to each bookmarking sites, peer-review forums, and policy article—for example, the DOI or PubMed ID, documents, we are now able to see a much richer will remain the same whether hosted on the pub- picture of the true reach of the scholarly content. lisher’s site or within an institutional repository. Numerous tools developed by a handful of Using this method, we have so far collated over small start-up companies, such as Altmetric, Im- 7.5 million mentions, relating to over 1.8 million pact Story, and Plum Analytics, are now available articles. for easily tracking and monitoring these channels, Some papers, of course, will receive much more which are becoming increasingly important in the attention than others. It is important to remember wider scholarly context. As a way of determin- that altmetrics provide an indication of reach, not ing reach beyond (but complementary to) the quality. An article or topic that has broad appeal, more traditional journal-level citation tracking, particularly amongst the general public, is likely to 10 Editorial Ofce News www.ismte.org FEBRUARY 2014 ARTICLE Altmetrics ARTICLE see a high number of mentions. Examples of this to begin to achieve a consensus on the standard- include the 2013 papers, “Overview of Active Ce- ization for altmetrics data as a whole, and to dis- sium Contamination of Freshwater Fish in Fukushima cuss and form a roadmap for how the field is likely and Eastern Japan,” which has received over 9,000 to progress. mentions on Twitter alone, and “Primary Preven- 2013 saw a number of prominent titles move to tion of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterra- integrate altmetrics data on their journal platforms nean Diet,” which has so far been featured by over using the Altmetric application programming in- 40 mainstream news outlets. terface (API). Publishers including Nature Pub- The scope for development within altmetrics is lishing Group, the BMJ Group, the Royal Society huge. To their favour, altmetrics provide a rapid of Chemistry, and BioMed Central all now display and timely method of assessing the attention a pa- altmetrics for each article—usually accessible via per receives—particularly in comparison to cita- a “metrics” tab or similar. The team at Nature tions, which take years to accumulate. By examin- Climate Change is currently trialing a “trending ing the raw data behind each mention, it is often articles” list, based on the online activity on any possible to identify online communities who have given day. The data are pulled on request directly taken an interest in the research but may other- from our servers, and provide users with an in- wise have gone undetected. This is particularly stant compilation of the mentions for each paper. relevant in cases where the work has a more prac- Displaying the data in this way allows authors and tical application—for example a paper which is readers to easily gauge the attention their work is little cited may in fact have had a large amount of receiving, and can help the publishing teams iden- impact on policy and amongst the clinical nursing tify which are their most talked-about articles, or community, who do not tend to actively publish where there is perhaps a need to increase their research. communication efforts. One must consider that the measures used to- Additionally, we offer the opportunity to ex- day may not be considered important in five years’ plore the altmetrics data for any article via a time, and there are some contentious issues in the web application: the Altmetric Explorer. Users space that must be continually addressed. At pres- can search by DOI, keyword, journal, publisher, ent, the collation of altmetrics is not standardized, funder, and a number of other filters. This enables although there is much crossover between provid- a comparison between related journals, which can ers and sources. It is yet to be determined which give a unique insight into how your publication is outlets are the most important to track—and the performing. results need to be carefully reviewed in context Overall, the reception for altmetrics has so far before any meaningful conclusions can be drawn. been mostly positive. Uptake amongst publish- Technical limitations, such as the inability to track ers has been high, and already we see examples multimedia (audio and video) unless the unique of researchers incorporating the data surrounding identifier can be found in the metadata, are a rec- their articles into their CVs. As the amount of on- ognized issue. Others have raised concerns that line discussion around published research contin- the altmetrics data could be easily gamed—fake ues to grow, altmetrics as a tool for identifying and Twitter accounts abound, and large numbers of exploring the broader impact of scholarly work are mentions are simple to create. At Altmetric we anticipated to continue to gain in significance. have developed a spam-watching algorithm in If you are interested in finding out more or in- order to combat this—any suspect mentions are tegrating altmetrics data for your journal, you can flagged and investigated by our team. visit www.altmetric.com, or email info@altmetric. Recent workshops run by the Public Library com. We’re always open to new opportunities and of Science (PLOS) and the National Information would be happy to work with you to develop a Standards Organisation (NISO) have taken steps custom solution. FEBRUARY 2014 Editorial Ofce News www.ismte.org 11.