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Review Article Library Progress (International). Vol. 37 No.1 2017: P.127-134 Print version ISSN 0970 1052 Online version ISSN 2320 317X DOI 10.5958/2320-317X.2017.00013.7

ALTMETRICS: MEASURING SOCIETAL IMPACT OF

Dr. Babita Jaiswal

Abstract

Altmetrics provides an opportunity to measure the research and its findings which are publicly available in web-based avenues such as digital repositories, open access journals blogs, facebook and other social networking tools. It is metrics which is based on the social web. Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analyzing and informing scholarship. Article gives the concept of

Altmetrics and describes the tools and benefits of Altmetrics.

Keywords: Altmetrics, Altmetrics Tools, Altmetrics Benefits, Metric studies

Introduction

Communication and Memory are central to human experience. We are the only creatures on earth with a true sense of history, a desire and an ability to remember and analyze events in the past, and to make arrangements that allow us to record our knowledge and ideas in perpetuity, so that they can be recovered and understood by generations not yet born in societies which do not yet exist. Uniquely, we can communicate across time and space and have developed systems and devices that enable us to do so. The process of writing, producing and selling printed is the unchallenged of communication between literate people. It has become a paradigm. Invention of visual phenomena –photography, film, and video are also a milestone in the history of communication. Telegraph, Telephone, Radio and Television have accelerated the speed of communication. At the very end of the history of communication we have computer.

It has both demanded and facilitated the convergence of technologies, which allow us to combine computing with telecommunication and the digitization of text and images to permit almost instantaneous worldwide transmission of data. Network which was firstly used for military and commercial purposes in the 1960s became popular among the common men. The , a distinguished network of networks has become a vital and considerable medium of communication. , E-mail, Social Networking tools etc. have been explored. These tools have provided opportunity to research scholars, students, faculty to participate in process. Association of College and Research

Author’s Affiliation: Associate , Department of Library and Information , Lucknow , Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

Corresponding Author: Dr. Babita Jaiswal, Associate Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, Lucknow University, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

Email: [email protected]

Received on 30.05.2017, Accepted on 11.06.2017

Babita Jaiswal / Altmetrics: Measuring Societal Impact of Research

Libraries defines scholarly communication as "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels.”

Source: http://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/

Traditional scholarly output has long been in the form of academic journal publications but now outputs are not restricted to only academic journal publication. Scholarly communication is in non-traditional forms also. Non-traditional forms include presentations, slides, datasets, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media. For as long as scholars have been their research, there has been interest in determining the impact of those publications. Attempts to capture scholarly impact of academic journal publication have been measured using methods collectively referred to as “.” Bibliometrics indicators fail to measure the broader societal impact of research because citations are collected from journal articles mostly written and published by academicians, research scholars and scientists. The open access movement began in the 1990s and it has given a boost to online publishing. Research findings and research outputs are publicly available in web-based open access avenues such as digital repositories, open access journals blogs, facebook and other social networking tools. These makes research available to anyone with an Internet connection who has the ability to search and read the material and have significant impact on society. To measure the impact of scholarly publications published in open and online platform, indicators are required. Bibliometric indicators do not support digital schlorship. They are inadequate, inappropriate and skewed due to various reason. Altmetrics provides an opportunity both to more acutely measure the propagation of this communication and to reconsider how we measure research impact in general. It is metrics which is based on the social web.

Altmetrics

The San Francisco Declaration on Research (DORA) publicly declared a statement on 16th December 2012 supporting altmetrics or alternative metrics also widely known as article level metrics, which is a clear transition from the citation-based indicators such as JIF and H-index to measuring impacts beyond citations of a particular piece of research work. Altmetrics offers a different view of the influence of that work. The term Altmetrics was proposed by Jason Priem on 8th September 2010, a Ph.D student at the school of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill through a tweet. It was tweeted as “#Altmetrics for #article level metrics”. Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analyzing and informing scholarship. It is the study of new indicators for the of academic activity based on Web 2.0. Depending on the information source Altmetrics can encompass a range of insights including the number of views and downloads a research output receives, and how often that research

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is referenced online in public policy documents, , social media, news media, post- publication, forums, blogs, Wikipedia, and more. For deriving Altmetrics score the following indicators are used:

 Views and downloads from online repositories and databases  Sharing through social media  Citations and discussions in blogs and wikis  Social bookmarking (for example, Delicious and CiteULike)  Mentions and comment counts (for example, in YouTube)  Holdings in library collections

Users of Altmetric

Researchers

 Complement reading by instantly visualising a paper's online attention.

 Discover new scholarly articles in hundreds of disciplines

 Monitoring personal research impact in academia and beyond.

Publisher

 Showcase research impact to authors and readers in a beautiful new way.  Monitor, search and measure all of the conversations about journal’s articles, as well as those published by your competitors.

Librarians & Repository Managers

 Add value to libraries and institutional repositories.  Track article level metrics for institution's research outputs; and  show faculty, staff and students a richer picture of their online research impact.

Altmetrics Tools

In Altmetrics, usable data can be generated or harvested from a wide variety of sources. Number of online tools including social media websites, information sharing sites, and online scholarly networks are used to create, collect, share, organise and manage information. Some tools are specifically created for the purpose of Altmetrics, while many take advantage of existing data generated for both scholarly and non-scholarly purposes. Likewise, some are freely available online, while others require a subscription or registration to access and are variously funded by grants, advertisements, companies, or the aforementioned subscriptions. In recent years, companies have emerged with different tools and services to track article level metrics and altmetrics including Impact Story, Plum Analytics (owned by EBSCO), and Digital Science company Altmetric. These tools can be used by journals to gather altmetrics data for their publication at the journal and article level, and by individual scholars to track the online activity surrounding their published works.

For the purpose of better understanding altmetrics tools are categorised into scholarly and non-scholarly tools. Scholarly tools are those tools which have been created for an academic audience. Because of this, the metrics generated from these tools can tell us more about the scholarly impact of contributions like journal articles. Non-scholarly tools are those tools which have not developed for the purpose of altmetrics or even with a particularly academic focus. They only give us some insight into the impact of scholarship, particularly as it affects the public.

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Table 1: Major Altmetrics Tools

S. Scholarly tools Description Non-Scholarly Description N tools 1. CiteULike CiteULike is a Amazon Amazon serves as a place www.citeulike. social www.amazon.in to retrieve overall rating org bookmarking and reviews. website. It is specifically designed for researchers to save and organize journal citations into their personal libraries.

2. Institutional Many IRs contain YouTube YouTube is a popular Repositories metrics about the www.youtube.c video-sharing website. repository’s om Metrics include the total artifacts such as number of views for a views and video, along with the downloads. number of comments and favourites that a video has received. 3. Mendeley Mendeley is a free Twitter When a URL is Tweeted or www.mendele citation manager. www.twitter.co Retweeted, the number of y.com It helps m Tweets can be counted, as researchers to save well as the total reach of and organize those Tweets—that is, the citations. total number of Twitter users that follow everyone who has Tweeted the URL, meaning that they may have read the Tweet or clicked on the URL. 4. ResearchGate ResearchGate is a Facebook It is used to share www.research closed peer www.facebook.c academic information like gate.net network system. om journal articles, video Research Gate presentations, and blog users can upload posts. The number of times their citations and a URL has been shared or fulltext articles Liked can be counted and and get metrics for reported by outside tools views, bookmarks, such as altmetrics and downloads harvesters, after registration i.e. free of cost. 5. It is a document Goodreads Goodreads can give us Research repository. Each www.goodreads metrics only for a specific Network registered .com type of scholarship, that is, (SSRN) individual books. It is a sort of “online www.ssrn.com member is free to bookshelf” for readers upload his/her where they can keep track published papers of books read, rate them, and other and look for book ~ 130 ~

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academic contents recommendations from and disseminate to other Good reads readers. global researchers communities. SSRN portal organizes contents based of ranking of top papers, authors and institutions. These top ranking profiles also include citation metrics and download statistics.

6. Academia .edu It was established Slideshare On SlideShare, users can www.academi in 2008. A closed www.slideshare upload a series of slides. a.edu peer network .net Metrics include total system where number of views, researchers can Favorites, comments and create a free downloads and users can profile and upload access detailed metrics citations and full- including number of views text works, follow over time, other authors and track their usage metrics over time.

Altmetrics Service Providers

Altmetric service providers provide article level metric data. They harvest the data from many sources including scholarly and non-scholarly tools and synthesize and contextualize the data in most meaningful manner. This helps to provide a more in-depth understanding of a scholarly work. Each provider has different features, strengths, and weaknesses. They all serve similar but distinct purposes with different intended audiences. The leading service providers are Altmetric.com and impactstory.org.

Table 2: Leading Service Providers

S. Service URL Description N providers 1 Impact Story www.impactstory.org The ImpactStory.org is leading provider of article level metrics data. This website offers registered users creating their impact profile on the web, revealing diverse impacts of their articles, books, presentations, datasets and software. This is a collaborative not-for-profit open source project supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, 2 Altmetrics www.altmetric.com This website, registered by Altmetric LLP, offers many tools for web integration of altmetric data that help individual

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Babita Jaiswal / Altmetrics: Measuring Societal Impact of Research

researchers, authors, publishers and institutions in instantly obtaining overall altmetric score of published articles. Articles published in online journals having unique digital object identifier (DOIs) are only considered to obtain an altmetric score for each article. Major online journal publishers have been found using tools provided by this website

Table 3: Tools provided by Altmetric.com

S. Tools provided by Description N. Altmetric.com 1 AltmetricExplorer It instantly generates an altmetric score for each article aggregating counts from different Web 2.0 enabled online resources and more particularly from the social media platforms and online news media. 2 Altmetric it It is a simple browser tool that instantly provides article level metrics for any recent paper. 3 Altmetric API It is an application programming interface that enables us to enrich our pages with article level metrics data. 4 Altmetric Badge It is a ready-to-use embeddable badge for the article pages that can showcase impact in a beautiful way. This tool generates small donut shaped multicolour, multilayer visualisations to quickly convey information about each article, with summary of score from different data sources.

Benefits of Altmetrics

Altmetrics supplement the existing range of metrics and it may provide valuable insight into public interactions with their research. Some scholarly publications and online repositories are experimenting with embedding these metrics as value-added content and to demonstrate community and/or scholarly engagement with the content. Nowadays the researchers’ communities along with research funding agencies are giving much importance to altmetrics, due to better reflection of social impact and outreach of scientific publications using altmetric tools. These altmetrics are fast. Data appears in days or weeks, instead of the years required by citations. They are diverse, tracking impacts all across a quickly changing scholarly communication landscape populated by: diverse products beyond the article, including datasets, software, and blog posts; diverse platforms beyond the traditional journal, like institutional repositories and online communities; and diverse audiences beyond the , including practitioners, clinicians, and the general public. It’s not just journals and publishers that can benefit from altmetrics – they offer huge value for authors and readers of scholarly content as well. The potential uses of altmetrics for academics fall into three main categories: for monitoring and tracking early attention, for showcasing engagement, and for discovery purposes. Benefits of using Altmetrics for tracking and analyzing scholarly communication are as follows:

 It shows the attention, reception, and response to a published work prior to it being cited. It shows that research is being read and used long before it is formally cited, and often almost immediately following publication.  It can be applied to non-traditional research outputs like data-sets and blog posts.  It shows research impact in real-time -- scholars and journals don’t have to wait for their score to be released, like in the . ~ 132 ~

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 Altmetrics tools allow scholars to collect and share the impact of their research portfolios.  It can supplement traditional bibliometrics data (such as downloads and citation counts) to give authors and readers a fuller picture of the broader impacts of published research.  Showcasing insights gathered via altmetrics alongside things like citation counts, face to face interviews or other quantifiable types of impact can really help to highlight the full picture of the scholarly works.  Altmetrics does not give any insight about the quality of the article or the author, but it can help to see which articles have received a lot of attention.  It helps in identifying potential new collaborators or new communities to engage with by seeing who is taking an active interest in research in any given field. This help in building a very effective outreach strategy.  Altmetrics enable scholars to take a look at the other work being published and publicized in their field and identify the most effective routes to the engagement and attention they want to generate for their own work.  Altmetrics enable authors to keep track of how many people are talking about their work, but also what is being said. This means that authors can now be quickly alerted to any misinterpretation or misuse of their research, and have the opportunity to respond directly to the source - a key factor in enabling them to more easily manage and retain control of their professional reputation and online presence.

Final Thoughts In comparison to traditional metrics used to measure scholarly output, altmetrics include a much broader spectrum of measurements (citation counts, web based references, article views/downloads, social media mentions, news media mentions, etc.) of a much broader collection of scholarly authors and outputs (articles, people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, etc.). Altmetrics tend to measure article-level usage, thus they offer a more granular way of measuring many aspects of scholarly output than do journal level tools like the Journal . Altmetrics became possible as a result of same technological advances that make the communications they measure possible. Sources of altmetrics display the same variety as the scholarly outputs that they measure and the ways in which those outputs are communicated. It is becoming common place for publishers and aggregators of scholarly articles and other content to provide altmetrics along with that content. Altmetrics are a natural extension of what libraries and librarians already do. Altmetrics are in their early stages; many questions are unanswered. But given the crisis facing existing filters and the rapid of scholarly communication, the speed, richness, and breadth of altmetrics make them worth investing in.

References

1. Feather, John (2000).The Information Society: study of . London, Library Association. 2. King, Pam and Thuna, Mindy (2013). Altmetrics in Context. http://www.carl- abrc.ca/doc/CARL2013-altmetrics-EN-FA.pdf 3. Lapinsk, Scott, Piwowar, Heather and Priem, Jason (2013) Riding the crest of the altmetrics wave: How librarians can help prepare faculty for the next generation of research impact metrics. College and Research Libraries,74(6). 4. Measuring Scholarly Impact (2017) from University of Pittsburg websites, http://www.library.pitt.edu/measuring-scholarly-impact 5. Pradhan Pallab (2015). Altmetrics: Measuring the Broader Impact of Scientific Research. INFLIBNET Newsletter,22(2),14-23 6. Priem,J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P. & Neylon, C. (2010) Altmetrics: A manifesto, http://altmetrics.org/manifesto 7. Roemer Robin Chin and Borchardt Rachel (2015). Major Altmetrics Tools. Library Technology Reports,51(5), https://journals.ala.org/index.php/ltr/article/view/5746/7187

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8. Scholarly Communication Toolkit: Scholarly Communication Overview(2016) Retrieved on May 29, 2107, http://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/ 9. Sutton, Sarah. W. (2014). Altmetrics: What Good are they to Academic Libraries? Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings, 4(2),http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/2160-942X.1041 10. UNESCO (2015). Research Evaluation Metrics.Paris,UNESCO 11. What are Altmetric? Capturing the online attention surrounding the scholarly content. https://www.altmetric.com/about-altmetrics/what-are-altmetrics/ 12. Williams, Catherine and Padula, Danielle. The Evolution of impact Indicators:from Bibliometrics to Altmetrics http://www.opda.cam.ac.uk/file/evolution-of-impact- indicators.pdf

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