To be published in: Cassidy R. Sugimoto (Ed.). Theories of Informetrics: A Festschrift in Honor of Blaise Cronin Interpreting “altmetrics”: viewing acts on social media through the lens of citation and social theories *,1 1 2 Stefanie Haustein , Timothy D. Bowman & Rodrigo Costas *
[email protected] 1 École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, QC, H3C 3J7 (Canada) 2 Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 62A, 2333 AL Leiden (The Netherlands) 1. Introduction More than 30 years after Blaise Cronin’s seminal paper (Cronin, 1981; see reprint in this book) the metrics community is once again in need of a new theory, this time one for so-called “altmetrics”. Altmetrics, short for alternative (to citation) metrics —and as such a misnomer— refers to a new group of metrics based (largely) on social media events relating to scholarly communication. The term originated on 29 September 2010 in a tweet by Jason Priem in which he uttered his preference for the word altmetrics in the context of various metrics provided for PLOS journal articles: “I like the term #articlelevelmetrics, but it fails to imply *diversity* of measures. Lately, I’m liking #altmetrics.” (Priem, 2010). Although Priem is responsible for coining the term, the idea of measuring broader scientific impact through the web and had been discussed by Cronin and others (e.g., Almind & Ingwersen, 1997; Cronin, Snyder, Rosenbaum, Martinson, & Callahan, 1998; Cronin, 2001; see also Thelwall's chapter in this book) in the context of webometrics years before: Scholars may be cited formally, or merely mentioned en passant in listservs and others electronic discussion fora, or they may find that they have been included in reading lists or electronic syllabi.