Submitted by Michael Boock

Research funding is decreasing and is more competitive. Funders are interested in being able to demonstrate the impact of their funding. Looking for evidence–more metrics to provide a bigger picture of impact of research. NSF is beginning to evaluate researchers based on non-conventional products of research such as youtube videos about the research as well as articles that result from research. Altmetrics can capture the use of these outputs. Alt metrics can also capture other things that are involved in the research process. Metrics that might better indicate community engagement and student learning.

Altmetrics–new kinds of measures that allow us to better understand full range of research impacts. The study and use of article-level scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments. Easier and easier to get this information because it is available online: downloading of datasets on figshare and dryad, mentions in wikipedia, mention on blogs, twitter, Facebook; mainstream media; comments, reviews and recommendations at PLOS, PeerJ, F1000 and other publisher sites; Mendeley.

Different sources of alt metrics data: Altmetrics.com, SCOPUS, PLOS, etc. All data sources are subject to error and bias.

Important to contextualize any metrics (bibliometrics, article level metrics such as downloads): slideshare.net/paulwouters1/issi2013-wg-pw. Use as evidence in a larger story. Numbers that provide some evidence of research impact.

Going to be possible to get aggregations of metrics at institutional level, individual faculty level, department level, research group level, ad hoc group level. Also at project level, could pull metrics for any research outputs resulting from a particular project. Institutional level metrics could enable universities to benchmark research impact against peers.

Can use Impactstory to determine the degree of open access of publications resulting from a grant.

Can’t distinguish between positive and negative comments, but that’s true with citation analysis too.

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Snowball Metrics

A collaboration between universities in the UK and Elsevier to measure research across the full range of research activities. Includes metrics relating to research inputs, research processes and research outputs that support institutional strategic
decision making through benchmarking. The metrics are:
• Defined and agreed by higher education institutions themselves
• Aspire to become global standards and cover the entire spectrum of research activities
• Tested methodologies are freely available and can be generated by any organization
• Can be generated independent of data source.
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Library can provide services related to research impact through institutional repositories. Hui has hired an intern to investigate options for providing alt metrics for items in ScholarsArchive@OSU. Plum Analytics, Altmetrics.com and other companies are providing alt metrics data associated with resources in IRs. Can use these tools to capture number of downloads, mentions, social media shares, tweets, likes; citations via PubMed and SCOPUS, etc.

Alt metrics create a feedback loop for researchers that provides information about research impacts over time and in different ways.

Should new assessment librarian have research impact and evaluation responsibilities? CDSS/Assessment Librarian could provide workshop on strategies for enhancing and tracking research impact including alt metrics.

Important for librarians to stay up to date on funding/reporting requirements and understand the motivations of stakeholders.

Citations give incomplete evidence of impact because they are limited to author’s perspectives, and 3-5 years are needed before you can begin to measure impact based on citations.

There is a need for stronger evidence, including qualitative evidence, to demonstrate value/meaningfulness of alt metrics. More research needed. Which stats are the same? Which metrics make a difference? Bar/Line/Chart? Does it matter?

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Publisher Perspectives on Using Altmetrics

PLOS has been harvesting and publishing alt metrics data since 2009. Provide page views from PMC and PLOS platforms, cumulative views over time and comparison with other articles in subject area. Provide most bookmarked filter on journal search page. PLOS and ELife provide info about downloads and bookmark metrics in article browse displays, search results and RSS feeds.

PLOS has an ALM reporting tool for researchers, institutions and funders to generate ALM reports that aggregate and customize ALM. More information: http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/

Public Knowledge Project (Open Journal Systems) began providing ALM a couple months ago. Our OJS instance doesn’t yet make this data available as part of our OJS publishing services.