Altmetrics for Information Professionals

1

The Past

Abstract

The first part of the book will discuss the past of altmetrics, its origins, its scientific roots, and its connection with bibliometrics and webometrics. In many aspects the past of altmetrics is also the past of bibliometrics and webometrics, but it needs to be emphasized that the beginning of altmetrics does not mean the end of bibliometrics or webometrics. The three research areas are developing side by side, learning from each other, complementing each other. This part of the book will give an overview of scholarly communication and the research methods involved in “counting, measuring, and weighing” it, namely bibliometrics and more recently, after the advent of the web, webometrics to analyze scholarly communication ...