What’s the difference between altmetrics and other measures of research influence? Exploring alternative metrics, impact factors, and more.

Lillian Hoffecker, PhD, MLSDana Abbey, MLS

MLA 2014: Building Our Information Future

Objective• To demonstrate ways librarians can assist

clinicians and researchers discover their scholarly value by understanding different research metrics

What’s Being Measured?• Citation metrics

– How often an individual article was cited

• Altmetrics– “Crowdsourcing” the social web for

analyzing reach and visibility of research

Changing Landscape of Research Metrics• Citation Metrics

– Impact factor– Eigenfactor

• Other Metrics– PlumX– Altmetric.com

Our Study• Product selection

– PlumX• Participant selection

– 3 nursing faculty– 2 practicing physician/researchers– 1 biomedical researcher

PlumX

Altmetric Explorer

ComparisonAltmetric.com PlumX

Data Gathered Mendeley, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news media

In addition: WorldCat book holdings, usage, citation data

Measurement Specific work Individual Author

Visual Representation

“Donut” Chart/”Sunburst”

Time Coverage Late 2010 to present Non social media can go back many years

Data Manipulation Author has control of data. The bookmarklet allows author to pull information.

Author does not have control of data. Problems with author disambiguation.

Subjects Science especially health sciences

Science, social sciences and humanities

Q1: Which metric do you value the most?

Citations and usage - for academic purposes the most important thing would really be citations (for academia) and usage (for real-world how important is this in potentially changing practice).

Questions asked of study participants:

Q2: What would you use these metrics for?

Funding opportunities, showing that our work is making a difference in changing practice patterns, promotion and tenure, and potentially for collaborators (who cited my work, who might be interested in working with me).

Q3: Would you contact someone discussing your research?

I would (have) contacted someone who discusses my work via social media - and I asked them to join me in LinkedIn.

Q4: Do you have concerns about this information?

Anything relating to our work that is already out in public can get distributed however anyone wants…If it is important that something be kept secret, we just keep it a secret prior to publication.

Role of the Librarian• Promote open access and in particular an OA

fund at your institution• Communicate with researchers on ways to raise

profile• Contribute to social media (department liaisons)• Develop a knowledge base for tools to get people

started• Encourage use of unique author identifiers like

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)

Raising Researcher Profiles• Translate presentations• Make available in open access venues• Self-promote through social media and

professional networking• Utilize curating, bookmarking, and sharing tools

to promote content• Get in touch with those who download your work• Create a “plain language” version of your

technical work

Translated Presentations

Acknowledgments• Faculty Participants• Translators• Plum Analytics• Altmetric LLP

Thank You!