In this paper we review the socalled altmetrics or alternative metrics. This concept raises from the development of new indicators based on Web 2.0, for the evaluation of the research and academic activity. The basic assumption is that variables such as mentions in blogs, number of twits or of researchers bookmarking a research paper for instance, may be legitimate indicators for measuring the use and impact of scientific publications. In this sense, these indicators are currently the focus of the bibliometric community and are being discussed and debated. We describe the main platforms and indicators and we analyze as a sample the Spanish research output in Communication Studies. Comparing traditional indicators such as citations with these new indicators. The results show that the most cited papers are also the ones with a highest impact according to the altmetrics. We conclude pointing out the main shortcomings these metrics present and the role they may play when measuring the research impact through 2.0 platforms.
An extensive analysis of the presence of different altmetric indicators provided by Altmetric.com across scientific fields is presented, particularly focusing on their relationship with citations. Our results confirm that the presence and density of social media altmetric counts are still very low and not very frequent among scientific publications, with 15%-24% of the publications presenting some altmetric activity and concentrating in the most recent publications, although their presence is increasing over time. Publications from the social sciences, humanities and the medical and life scien…
There has been a proliferation of descriptive for COVID-19 papers using altmetrics. The main objective of this study is to analyse whether the altmetric mentions of COVID-19 medical studies are associated with the type of study and its level of evidence. Data were collected from PubMed and Altmetric.com databases. A total of 16,672 study types (e.g., Case reports or Clinical trials) published in the year 2021 and with at least one altmetric mention were retrieved. The altmetric indicators considered were Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), News mentions, Twitter mentions, and Mendeley readers. On…
This chapter discusses altmetrics (short for "alternative metrics"), an approach to uncovering previously-invisible traces of scholarly impact by observing activity in online tools and systems. I argue that citations, while useful, miss many important kinds of impacts, and that the increasing scholarly use of online tools like Mendeley, Twitter, and blogs may allow us to measure these hidden impacts. Next, I define altmetrics and discuss research on altmetric sources--both research mapping the growth of these sources, and scientometric research measuring activity on them. Following a discussio…
We measure the impact of "altmetrics" field by deploying altmetrics indicators using the data from Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki during 2010- 2014. To capture the social impact of scientific publications, we propose an index called alt-index, analogues to h-index. Across the deployed indices, our results have shown high correlation among the indicators that capture social impact. While we observe medium Pearson's correlation (\r{ho}= .247) among the alt-index and h-index, a relatively high correlation is observed between social citations an…
Recently, two new indicators (Equalized Mean-based Normalized Proportion Cited, EMNPC; Mean-based Normalized Proportion Cited, MNPC) were proposed which are intended for sparse scientometrics data. The indicators compare the proportion of mentioned papers (e.g. on Facebook) of a unit (e.g., a researcher or institution) with the proportion of mentioned papers in the corresponding fields and publication years (the expected values). In this study, we propose a third indicator (Mantel-Haenszel quotient, MHq) belonging to the same indicator family. The MHq is based on the MH analysis - an establish…
In 2018 Bornmann and Haunschild (2018a) introduced a new indicator called the Mantel-Haenszel quotient (MHq) to measure alternative metrics (or altmetrics) of scientometric data. In this article we review the Mantel-Haenszel statistics, point out two errors in the literature, and introduce a new indicator. First, we correct the interpretation of MHq and mention that it is still a meaningful indicator. Second, we correct the variance formula for MHq, which leads to narrower confidence intervals. A simulation study shows the superior performance of our variance estimator and confidence intervals…
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 collected metrics for 20,000 random publications from the Web of Science. We studied both the presence and distribution of altmetrics in the set of publications, across fields, document types and over publication years, as well as the extent to which altmetrics correlate with citation indicators. The main result of the study is that the altmetrics source that provides the most metrics is Mendeley, with metrics on readershi…
Sufficient data presence is one of the key preconditions for applying metrics in practice. Based on both Altmetric.com data and Mendeley data collected up to 2019, this paper presents a state-of-the-art analysis of the presence of 12 kinds of altmetric events for nearly 12.3 million Web of Science publications published between 2012 and 2018. Results show that even though an upward trend of data presence can be observed over time, except for Mendeley readers and Twitter mentions, the overall presence of most altmetric data is still low. The majority of altmetric events go to publications in th…
In this short communication, we provide an overview of a relatively newly provided source of altmetrics data which could possibly be used for societal impact measurements in scientometrics. Recently, Altmetric - a start-up providing publication level metrics - started to make data for publications available which have been mentioned in policy-related documents. Using data from Altmetric, we study how many papers indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) are mentioned in policy-related documents. We find that less than 0.5% of the papers published in different subject categories are mentioned at leas…
Social media based indicators or altmetrics have been under scrutiny for the last seven years. Their promise as alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact is still far from becoming a reality. Up to now, most studies have focused on the understanding of the nature and relation of altmetric indicators with citation data. Few papers have analysed research profiles based on altmetric data. Most of these have related to researcher profiles and the expansion of these tools among researchers. This paper aims at exploring the coverage of the Altmetric.com database and its potential use in ord…
Altmetrics from Altmetric.com are widely used by publishers and researchers to give earlier evidence of attention than citation counts. This article assesses whether Altmetric.com scores are reliable early indicators of likely future impact and whether they may also reflect non-scholarly impacts. A preliminary factor analysis suggests that the main altmetric indicator of scholarly impact is Mendeley reader counts, with weaker news, informational and social network discussion/promotion dimensions in some fields. Based on a regression analysis of Altmetric.com data from November 2015 and Scopus …
On December 31st 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology detected in Wuhan City. The cause of the syndrome was a new type of coronavirus isolated on January 7th 2020 and named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Since January 2020 an ever increasing number of scientific works have appeared in literature. Identifying relevant research outcomes at very early stages is challenging. In this work we use COVID-19 as a use-case for…
Altmetrics have been proposed as a way to assess the societal impact of research. Although altmetrics are already in use as impact or attention metrics in different contexts, it is still not clear whether they really capture or reflect societal impact. This study is based on altmetrics, citation counts, research output and case study data from the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), and peers' REF assessments of research output and societal impact. We investigated the convergent validity of altmetrics by using two REF datasets: publications submitted as research output (PRO) to the REF and…
In recent years, new indicators known as altmetrics have been introduced to measure the impact of scientific activity. These indicators are obtained through the mentions realised from different social media, existing several aggregators of these data that collect several of them in the same database, being Altmetric.com the most popular. However, in spite of the popularization of these metrics, several limitations in their use have been manifested. For this reason, rhe objective of this work is twofold: (1) to show the possibilities of altimetric techniques applied to the Spanish social scienc…
Identifying important scholarly literature at an early stage is vital to the academic research community and other stakeholders such as technology companies and government bodies. Due to the sheer amount of research published and the growth of ever-changing interdisciplinary areas, researchers need an efficient way to identify important scholarly work. The number of citations a given research publication has accrued has been used for this purpose, but these take time to occur and longer to accumulate. In this article, we use altmetrics to predict the short-term and long-term citations that a s…
Alternative metrics (aka altmetrics) are gaining increasing interest in the scientometrics community as they can capture both the volume and quality of attention that a research work receives online. Nevertheless, there is limited knowledge about their effectiveness as a mean for measuring the impact of research if compared to traditional citation-based indicators. This work aims at rigorously investigating if any correlation exists among indicators, either traditional (i.e. citation count and h-index) or alternative (i.e. altmetrics) and which of them may be effective for evaluating scholars.…
Social media has become integrated into the fabric of the scholarly communication system in fundamental ways: principally through scholarly use of social media platforms and the promotion of new indicators on the basis of interactions with these platforms. Research and scholarship in this area has accelerated since the coining and subsequent advocacy for altmetrics -- that is, research indicators based on social media activity. This review provides an extensive account of the state-of-the art in both scholarly use of social media and altmetrics. The review consists of two main parts: the first…
In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics", sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around…
Bibliometrics is successful in measuring impact, because the target is clearly defined: the publishing scientist who is still active and working. Thus, citations are a target-oriented metric which measures impact on science. In contrast, societal impact measurements based on altmetrics are as a rule intended to measure impact in a broad sense on all areas of society (e.g. science, culture, politics, and economics). This tendency is especially reflected in the efforts to design composite indicators (e.g. the Altmetric attention score). We deem appropriate that not only the impact measurement us…
The article-level metrics (ALMs) or altmetrics becomes a new trendsetter in recent times for measuring the impact of scientific publications and their social outreach to intended audiences. The popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin and social bookmarks such as Mendeley and CiteULike are nowadays widely used for communicating research to larger transnational audiences. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment got signed by the scientific and researchers communities across the world. This declaration has given preference to the ALM or altmetrics ove…
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…
The present study aims to analyze 1) the relationship between Citation Normalized Score of scientific publications and Article Processing Charges (APCs) of Gold Open Access (OA) publications 2) the determinants of APCs. To do so, we used APCs information provided by the OpenAPC database, citation scores of publications from the WoS database and, for Altmetrics, data from Altmetrics.com database, over the period from 2006 to 2019 for 83,752 articles published in 4751 journals belonging to 267 distinct publishers. Results show that contrary to common belief, paying high APCs does not necessarily…
More than five years after their emergence, altmetrics are still seen as a promise to complement traditional citation-based indicators. However, no study has focused on their potential usefulness to capture the impact of scholarly books. While recent literature shows that citation indicators cannot fully capture the impact of books, other studies have suggested alternative indicators such as usage, publishers' prestige or library holdings. In this paper, we calculate 18 indicators which range from altmetrics to library holdings, views, downloads or citations to the production of monographs of …
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 pub…
Following in the footsteps of the model of scientific communication, which has recently gone through a metamorphosis (from the Gutenberg galaxy to the Web galaxy), a change in the model and methods of scientific evaluation is also taking place. A set of new scientific tools are now providing a variety of indicators which measure all actions and interactions among scientists in the digital space, making new aspects of scientific communication emerge. In this work we present a method for capturing the structure of an entire scientific community (the Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics, W…
As uptake among researchers is constantly increasing, social media are finding their way into scholarly communication and, under the umbrella term altmetrics, were introduced to research evaluation. Fueled by technological possibilities and an increasing demand to demonstrate impact beyond the scientific community, altmetrics received great attention as potential democratizers of the scientific reward system and indicators of societal impact. This paper focuses on current challenges of altmetrics. Heterogeneity, data quality and particular dependencies are identified as the three major issues …
Can altmetric data be validly used for the measurement of societal impact? The current study seeks to answer this question with a comprehensive dataset (about 100,000 records) from very disparate sources (F1000, Altmetric, and an in-house database based on Web of Science). In the F1000 peer review system, experts attach particular tags to scientific papers which indicate whether a paper could be of interest for science or rather for other segments of society. The results show that papers with the tag "good for teaching" do achieve higher altmetric counts than papers without this tag - if the q…
Assessing the impact of scholarly books is a difficult research evaluation problem. Library Catalog Analysis facilitates the quantitative study, at different levels, of the impact and diffusion of academic books based on data about their availability in libraries. The WorldCat global catalog collates data on library holdings, offering a range of tools including the novel WorldCat Identities. This is based on author profiles and provides indicators relating to the availability of their books in library catalogs. Here, we investigate this new tool to identify its strengths and weaknesses based o…
On the Alignment of Post-Publication Reviews & Bibliometric and Altmetric Impact -- A Case Study on Expert Statements from the Science Media Center Germany
This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is com…
The study explores the citedness of research data, its distribution over time and how it is related to the availability of a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) in Thomson Reuters' DCI (Data Citation Index). We investigate if cited research data "impact" the (social) web, reflected by altmetrics scores, and if there is any relationship between the number of citations and the sum of altmetrics scores from various social media-platforms. Three tools are used to collect and compare altmetrics scores, i.e. PlumX, ImpactStory, and Altmetric.com. In terms of coverage, PlumX is the most helpful altmetric…
More than 30 years after Cronin's seminal paper on "the need for a theory of citing" (Cronin, 1981), 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. As current definitions of altmetrics are shaped and limited by active platforms, technical possibilities, and business models of aggregators such as Altmetric.com, ImpactStory, PLOS, and Plum Analytics,…
China's scientific output has risen precipitously over the past decade; it is now the world's second-largest producer of scientific papers, behind only the United States. The quality of China's research is also on the rise (Van Noorden, 2016). The online visibility and impact of China's research are also important issues worth exploring. In this study, we investigate the altmetric performance of publications in the field of Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology and published by authors from Chinese affiliations. We find that papers published by those authors from Chinese affiliations have muc…
Taking the research area of Big Data as a case study, we propose an approach for exploring how academic topics shift through the interactions among audiences across different altmetric sources. Data used is obtained from Web of Science (WoS) and Altmetric.com, with a focus on Blog, News, Policy, Wikipedia, and Twitter. Author keywords from publications and terms from online events are extracted as the main topics of the publications and the online discussion of their audiences at Altmetric. Different measures are applied to determine the (dis)similarities between the topics put forward by the …
In this study, the presence and distribution of both Mendeley readerships and Web of Science citations for the publications published in the 43 Iranian international journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports have been investigated. The aim was to determine the impact, visibility and use of the publications published by the Iranian international journals in Mendeley compared to their citation impact; furthermore, to explore if there is any relation between these two impact indicators (Mendeley readership counts and WoS citation counts) for these publications. The DOIs of the 1,884 publicatio…
Social media metrics - commonly coined as "altmetrics" - have been heralded as great democratizers of science, providing broader and timelier indicators of impact than citations. These metrics come from a range of sources, including Twitter, blogs, social reference managers, post-publication peer review, and other social media platforms. Social media metrics have begun to be used as indicators of scientific impact, yet the theoretical foundation, empirical validity, and extent of use of platforms underlying these metrics lack thorough treatment in the literature. This editorial provides an ove…
In this article, we develop a method that uses altmetric data to analyse researchers' interactions, as a way of mapping the contexts of potential societal impact. In the face of an increasing policy demand for quantitative methodologies to assess societal impact, social media data (altmetrics) has been presented as a potential method to capture broader forms of impact. However, current altmetric indicators were extrapolated from traditional citation approaches and are seen as problematic for assessing societal impact. In contrast, established qualitative methodologies for societal impact asses…
This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific papers deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the perspective of social media metrics (altmetrics), where mentions of scholarly documents on Twitter have been suggested as a means of measuring impact that is both broader and timelier than citations. We present preliminary findings that automated Twitter accounts create a considerable amount of tweets to scientific papers and that they behave differently than co…
In this paper we examine if hyperlink-based (webometric) indicators can be used to rank academic websites. Therefore we analyzed the interlinking structure of German university websites and compared our simple hyperlink-based ranking with official and web-independent rankings of universities. We found that link impact could not easily be seen as a prestige factor for universities.
Altmetrics promise useful support for assessing the impact of scientific works, including beyond the scholarly community and with very limited citation windows. Unfortunately, altmetrics scores are currently available only for recent articles and cannot be used as covariates in predicting long term impact of publications. However, the study of their statistical properties is a subject of evident interest to scientometricians. Applying the same approaches used in the literature to assess the universality of citation distributions, the intention here is to test whether the universal distribution…
The web-based microblogging system Twitter is a very popular altmetrics source for measuring the broader impact of science. In this case study, we demonstrate how problematic the use of Twitter data for research evaluation can be, even though the aspiration of measurement is degraded from impact to attention measurement. We collected the Twitter data for the paper published by Yamamizu et al. (2017). An investigative committee found that the main figures in the paper are fraudulent.
The starting point of this paper is a desktop research assessment model that does not take properly into account the complexities of research assessment, but rather bases itself on a series of highly simplifying, questionable assumptions related to the availability, validity and evaluative significance of research performance indicators, and to funding policy criteria. The paper presents a critique of this model, and proposes alternative assessment approaches, based on an explicit evaluative framework, focusing on preconditions to performance or communication effectiveness rather than on perfo…
Purpose: This paper explores some influencing factors of Twitter mentions of scientific research. The results can help to understand the relationships between various altmetrics. Design/methodology/approach: Data on research mentions in Altmetric and a multiple linear regression analysis are used. Findings: Among the variables analyzed, the number of mainstream news is the factor that most influences the number of mentions on Twitter, followed by the fact of dealing with a highly topical issue such as COVID-19. The influence is weaker in the case of expert recommendations and the consolidation…
A crucial goal of funding research and development has always been to advance economic development. On this basis, a consider-able body of research undertaken with the purpose of determining what exactly constitutes economic impact and how to accurately measure that impact has been published. Numerous indicators have been used to measure economic impact, although no single indicator has been widely adapted. Based on patent data collected from Altmetric we predict patent citations through various social media features using several classification models. Patents citing a research paper implies …
The ongoing paradigm change in the scholarly publication system ('science is turning to e-science') makes it necessary to construct alternative evaluation criteria/metrics which appropriately take into account the unique characteristics of electronic publications and other research output in digital formats. Today, major parts of scholarly Open Access (OA) publications and the self-archiving area are not well covered in the traditional citation and indexing databases. The growing share and importance of freely accessible research output demands new approaches/metrics for measuring and for eval…
Although altmetrics and other web-based alternative indicators are now commonplace in publishers' websites, they can be difficult for research evaluators to use because of the time or expense of the data, the need to benchmark in order to assess their values, the high proportion of zeros in some alternative indicators, and the time taken to calculate multiple complex indicators. These problems are addressed here by (a) a field normalisation formula, the Mean Normalised Log-transformed Citation Score (MNLCS) that allows simple confidence limits to be calculated and is similar to a proposal of L…
The main goal of this research is to analyze the web structure and performance of units and services belonging to U.S. academic libraries in order to check their suitability for webometric studies. Our objectives include studying their possible correlation with economic data and assessing their use for complementary evaluation purposes. We conducted a survey of library homepages, institutional repositories, digital collections, and online catalogs (a total of 374 URLs) belonging to the 100 U.S. universities with the highest total expenditures in academic libraries according to data provided by…
In the context of altmetrics, tweets have been discussed as potential indicators of immediate and broader societal impact of scientific documents. However, it is not yet clear to what extent Twitter captures actual research impact. A small case study (Thelwall et al., 2013b) suggests that tweets to journal articles neither comment on nor express any sentiments towards the publication, which suggests that tweets merely disseminate bibliographic information, often even automatically. This study analyses the sentiments of tweets for a large representative set of scientific papers by specifically …
Today, ranking systems in universities have been considered by the academic community, and there is a tight competition between world universities to achieve higher ranks. In the meantime, the ranking of university websites is also in the spotlight, and the Webometric research center announces the ranks of university websites twice a year. Examining university rankings indicators and the Webometric ranks of the university indicates that some of these indicators, directly and indirectly, affect each other. On the other hand, a preliminary study of Webometric indicators shows that some Search En…
The present paper attempts to explore the relationship between the Turkish academic and industry systems by mapping the relationships under web indicators. We used the top 100 Turkish universities and the top 10 Turkish companies in 10 industrial sectors in order to observe the performance of web impact indicators. Total page count metric is obtained through Google Turkey and the pure link metrics have been gathered from Open Site Explorer. The indicators obtained both for web presence and web visibility indicated that there are significant differences between the group of academic institution…
In this study we analyse the key driving factors of preprints in enhancing scholarly communication. To this end we use four groups of metrics, one referring to scholarly communication and based on bibliometric indicators (Web of Science and Scopus citations), while the others reflect usage (usage counts in Web of Science), capture (Mendeley readers) and social media attention (Tweets). Hereby we measure two effects associated with preprint publishing: publication delay and impact. We define and use several indicators to assess the impact of journal articles with previous preprint versions in a…
This literature review identifies indicators that associate with higher impact or higher quality research from article text (e.g., titles, abstracts, lengths, cited references and readability) or metadata (e.g., the number of authors, international or domestic collaborations, journal impact factors and authors' h-index). This includes studies that used machine learning techniques to predict citation counts or quality scores for journal articles or conference papers. The literature review also includes evidence about the strength of association between bibliometric indicators and quality score …
For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of Thomson Reuters) produced the only available bibliographic databases from which bibliometricians could compile large-scale bibliometric indicators. ISI's citation indexes, now regrouped under the Web of Science (WoS), were the major sources of bibliometric data until 2004, when Scopus was launched by the publisher Reed Elsevier. For those who perform bibliometric analyses and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these two major databases raises the important question of the comparability an…
To what extent can news media help in providing more credible information about science? This is the core challenge for the Science Evidence Indicator (SEI) project, a collaboration between the Danish popular news website videnskab.dk and the authors of this paper. Looking specifically at medical science news, we aim to provide a transparent assessment of the scientific sources behind a story. This entails identifying some of the criteria that scientists use to assess research, and making it accessible and understandable for readers. We address the following research question: How can we commu…
