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Jason Priem1, Paul Groth2*, Dario Taraborelli3 1 School of Information & Library , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America, 2 Department of and The Network Institute, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 3 The Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco, California, United States of America

Introduction methods to gather evidence of broader them–tracks with potential to show infor- impacts and provide more detail about the mal paths of influence with unprecedented What paper should I read next? Who science system: tracking acknowledge- speed and resolution. Many of these tools should I talk to at a conference? Which ments [10], patents [11], mentorships offer open APIs, supporting large-scale, group should get this grant? [12], news articles [8], usage in syllabuses automated mining of online activities and Researchers and funders alike must make [13], and many others, separately and in conversations around research objects daily judgments on how to best spend their various combinations [14]. The emer- [21]. limited time and money–judgments that gence of the Web, a ‘‘nutrient-rich space Altmetrics [22,23] is the study and use are becoming increasingly difficult as the for scholars’’ [15], has held particular of scholarly impact measures based on volume of scholarly communication in- promise for new filters and lenses on activity in online tools and environments. creases. Not only does the number of scholarly output. Webometrics researchers The term has also been used to describe scholarly papers continue to grow, it is have uncovered evidence of informal the metrics themselves–one could propose joined by new forms of communication impact by examining networks of hyper- in plural a ‘‘set of new altmetrics.’’ from data publications to microblog posts. links and mentions on the broader Web Altmetrics is in most cases a subset of To deal with incoming information, [16–18]. An important strand of webo- both and webometrics; it is scholars have always relied upon filters. metrics has also examined the properties a subset of the latter in that it focuses more At first these filters were manually com- of article download data [7,19,20]. narrowly on scholarly influence as mea- piled compendia and corpora of the The last several years, however, have sured in online tools and environments, rather literature. But by the mid-20th century, presented a promising new approach to than on the Web more generally. filters built on manual indexing began to gathering fine-grained impact data: track- Altmetrics may support finer-grained break under the weight of booming maps of science, broader and more postwar science production. Garfield [1] ing large-scale activity around scholarly products in online tools and environments. equitable evaluations, and improvements and others pioneered a solution: automat- to the peer-review system [24]. On the ed filters that leveraged scientists own These tools and environments include, among others: other hand, the use and development of impact judgments, aggregating altmetrics should be pursued with appro- as ‘‘pellets of peer recognition.’’ [2]. N social media like Twitter and priate scientific caution. Altmetrics may These -based filters have dra- face attempts at manipulation similar to matically grown in importance and have N online reference managers like CiteU- Like, Zotero, and Mendeley what must deal with in web search become the tenet of how research impact ranking. Addressing such manipulation is measured. But, like manual indexing 60 N collaborative encyclopedias like Wiki- may, in-turn, impact the transparency of years ago, they may today be failing to pedia altmetrics. New and complex measures keep up with the literature’s growing N blogs, both scholarly and general- may distort our picture of the science volume, velocity, and diversity [3]. audience system if not rigorously assessed and Citations are heavily gamed [4–6] and N scholarly social networks, like Research- correctly understood. Finally, altmetrics are painfully slow to accumulate [7], and Gate or Academia.edu may promote an evaluation system for overlook increasingly important societal N conference organization sites like La- scholarship that many argue has become and clinical impacts [8]. Most importantly, overly focused on metrics. they overlook new scholarly forms like nyrd.com datasets, software, and research blogs that Growing numbers of scholars are using Scope of this Collection fall outside of the scope of citable research these and similar tools to mediate their The goal of this collection is to gather an objects. In sum, citations only reflect formal interaction with the literature. In doing so, emerging body of research for the further acknowledgment and thus they provide only a they are leaving valuable tracks behind study and use of altmetrics. We believe it is partial picture of the science system [9]. Scholars may discuss, annotate, recom- mend, refute, comment, read, and teach a Citation: Priem J, Groth P, Taraborelli D (2012) The Altmetrics Collection. PLoS ONE 7(11): e48753. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0048753 new finding before it ever appears in the formal citation registry. We need new Editor: Christos A. Ouzounis, The Centre for Research and , Hellas, Greece mechanisms to create a subtler, higher- Received October 1, 2012; Accepted October 4, 2012; Published November 1, 2012 resolution picture of the science system. : ß 2012 Priem et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, The Quest for Better Filters provided the original author and source are credited. The scientometrics community has not Funding: These authors have no support or funding to report. been blind to the limitations of citation Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. measures, and has collectively proposed * E-mail: [email protected]

PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 November 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 11 | e48753 The Altmetrics Collection greatly needed, as important questions N Validation of models of scientific The current collection includes articles regarding altmetrics’ prevalence, validity, discovery/recommendation based on that address many of these areas. It will distribution, and reliability remain incom- altmetrics publish new research on an ongoing basis, pletely answered. Importantly, the present N Qualitative research describing the and we hope to see additional contribu- collection, which has the virtue of being scholarly use of online tools and tions appear in the coming months. We online and , allows altmetrics environments look forward to building a foundation of researchers to experiment on themselves. N Empirically-supported theory guiding early research to support this new field. The collection’s scope includes: altmetrics’ use Author Contributions N Statistical analysis of altmetrics data N Other research relating to scholarly sources, and comparisons to estab- impact in online tools and environ- Wrote the paper: PG JP DT. lished sources ments. N Metric validation, and identification of in measurements

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PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 2 November 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 11 | e48753