Managing Scientific Information and Research Data

14

Measuring attention

social media and altmetrics

Abstract

Scholars are communicating in many different spheres today, using social media, mobile technology, and cloud computing. Until now, research has been evaluated using citation metrics such as the impact factor (IF) and h-index. As scholarly communication has shifted now mostly to online, other methods are needed to bring attention to research and measure its impact. Altmetrics, a new field that is creating and using such alternative metrics, takes into account not just citation counts of articles published in peer-reviewed journals. It involves collecting information from different sources and measuring interest in articles, people, journals, datasets, presentations, and other artifacts ...