New from BookNet Canada for 2024: BNC CataList - Tech Forum 2024
NISO Webinar: New Perspectives on Assessment How Altmetrics Measure Scholarly Impact
1. Disciplinary differences
and other biases
Exploring social media metrics in scholarly context
Stefanie Haustein
stefanie.haustein@umontreal.ca
@stefhaustein
3. Altmetrics: definitions
•
•
term coined by Jason Priem
introduced as a better filter
than and alternative to
citations and peer-review
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/
•
“…altmetrics is a good idea,
but a bad name”
“…we would like to propose
the term influmetrics”
Rousseau & Ye (2013)
•
•
rather complementary than
alternative to citations
social media metrics
4. Altmetrics: definitions
• ultimate goals
•
similar to but more timely than citations
predicting scientific impact
•
different, broader impact than captured by citations
measuring societal impact
•
impact of various outputs
“value all research products”
Piwowar (2013)
5. Altmetrics: definitions
•
Altmetrics are “representing very different things”
(Lin & Fenner, 2013)
•
unclear what exactly they measure:
• scientific impact
• social impact
• “buzz”
• all of the above?
8. Altmetrics: definitions
• complex to define and classify tools and motivations
•
•
scientific and non-scientific audiences cannot be
determined on the platform used
level of engagement differs not only between
platforms but also within:
saving paper to Mendeley library vs. tweeting about it
saving vs. reading
retweeting link vs. discussing content
differentiation between audiences and engagement
needed to determine meaning of metrics
9. Bibliometrics: in retrospect
• when Garfield created SCI, sociologists of science
analyzed meaning of publications and citations
(Merton, Zuckerman, Cole & Cole, etc.)
• sociological research
• What is it to publish a paper?
• What are the reasons to cite?
• empirical bibliometric research
• disciplinary differences in publication
•
and citation behavior
delay and obsolescence patterns
10. Bibliometrics: in retrospect
• empirical studies helped sociologists to understand
structure and norms of science
• for bibliometricians, studies provided a theoretical
framework and legitimation to use citation analysis
in research evaluation
• knowledge about disciplinary differences and
obsolescence patterns helped to normalize statistics
and create more appropriate indicators
11. Bibliometrics: in retrospect
• similar to development of SCI in the 1960s, social
media metrics have to be analyzed:
• qualitative studies to analyze who, how and why
•
people use various social media platforms
large-scale quantitative studies to determine
differences and biases in terms of disciplines, topics,
document types, publications years, publication types
and sources, author age and affiliation, etc.
to find out what various social media metrics mean
and what they can be used for
19. Altmetrics: disciplinary biases
x-axis:
coverage of
specialty on
platform
y-axis:
correlation
between social
media counts
and citations
bubble size:
intensity of use
based on mean
social media
count rate
20. Altmetrics: subject bias
General Biomedical Research papers 2011
Scatterplot of number of citations and number of tweets (A, ρ=0.181**) and Mendeley readers (B, ρ=0.677**),
bubble size represents number of Mendeley readers (A) and tweets (B). The respective three most tweeted (A)
and read (B) papers are labeled showing the first author.
21. Altmetrics: subject bias
Top 10 tweeted documents:
catastrophe & topical / web & social media / curious story
scientific discovery / health implication / scholarly community
Article
Journal
C
T
Hess et al. (2011). Gain of chromosome band 7q11 in papillary thyroid carcinomas of young patients
is associated with exposure to low-dose irradiation
PNAS
9
963
Yasunari et al. (2011). Cesium-137 deposition and contamination of Japanese soils due to the
Fukushima nuclear accident
PNAS
30
639
Sparrow et al. (2011). Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at
Our Fingertips
Science
11
558
Onuma et al. (2011). Rebirth of a Dead Belousov–Zhabotinsky Oscillator
Journal of Physical
Chemistry A
--
549
Silverberg (2012). Whey protein precipitating moderate to severe acne flares in 5 teenaged athletes
Cutis
--
477
Wen et al. (2011). Minimum amount of physical activity for reduced mortality and extended life
expectancy: a prospective cohort study
Lancet
51
419
Kramer (2011). Penile Fracture Seems More Likely During Sex Under Stressful Situations
Journal of Sexual
Medicine
--
392
Newman & Feldman (2011). Copyright and Open Access at the Bedside
New England
Journal of Medicine
3
332
Reaves et al. (2012). Absence of Detectable Arsenate in DNA from Arsenate-Grown GFAJ-1 Cells
Science
5
323
Bravo et al. (2011). Ingestion of Lactobacillus strain regulates emotional behavior and central GABA
receptor expression in a mouse via the vagus nerve
PNAS
31
297
22. Altmetrics: future
• before applying social media counts in information
retrieval and research evaluation, we need:
to understand and define meaning of various
social media metrics
to identify different biases
to differentiate between audiences and
level of engagement
more transparency and reliability in data aggregation
23. References
Bar-Ilan, J. (2011). Articles tagged by 'bibliometrics' on Mendeley and CiteULike. Paper presented at the Metrics 2011 Symposium on
Informetric and Scientometric Research, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Bar-Ilan, J., Haustein, S., Peters, I., Priem, J., Shema, H., & Terliesner, J. (2012). Beyond citations: Scholars' visibility on the social web.
In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, (pp. 98-109).
Haustein, S., Peters, I., Sugimoto, C.R., Thelwall, M., & Larivière, V. (in press). Tweeting biomedicine: an analysis of tweets and citations
in the biomedical literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Haustein, S., Bowman, T.D., Holmberg, K., Larivière, V., & Peters, I., (submitted). Astrophysicists on Twitter: An in-depth analysis of
tweeting and scientific publication behavior. Aslib Proceedings.
jasonpriem (2010, September 28). I like the term #articlelevelmetrics, but it fails to imply *diversity* of measures. Lately, I'm liking
#altmetrics. [Twitter post].
Li, X. & Thelwall, M. (2012). F1000, Mendeley and Traditional Bibliometric Indicators. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference
on Science and Technology Indicators, (pp. 541-551).
Li, X., Thelwall, M., & Giustini, D. (2012). Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement. Scientometrics, 91(2),
461-471.
Lin, J. & Fenner, M. (2013). Altmetrics in evolution: Defining and redefining the ontology of article-level metrics. Information Standards
Quarterly, 25(2), 20-26.
Mohammadi, E., & Thelwall, M. (in press). Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities: Research evaluation
and knowledge flows. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Piwowar, H. (2013). Value all research products. Nature, 493(7431), 159.
Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Hemminger, B.M. (2012). Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact. arXiv.
Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P. & Neylon, C. (2010). Alt-Metrics: A Manifesto.
Rousseau, R., & Ye, F.Y. (2013). A multi-metric approach for research evaluation. Chinese Science Bulletin, 58(26), 3288-3290.
Zahedi, Z., Costas, R., & Wouters, P. (2013). What is the impact of the publications read by the different Mendeley users? Could they help
to identify alternative types of impact? Presentation held at the PLoS ALM Workshop 2013 in San Francisco.
24. Thank you for your attention!
Questions?
Stefanie Haustein
stefanie.haustein@umontreal.ca
@stefhaustein