Altmetrics: State of the Art and a Look into the Future

Abstract

The development of alternative indicators (altmetrics) can be traced back to a discussion a few years ago where the central question was: does the focus on classical bibliometric indicators still adequately reflect the scientific and social significance of scientific work in the Internet age? In the course of this discussion, the term "altmetrics" was introduced as a collective term for all those indicators that contain previously unnoticed information from the Internet-especially concerning social media. Altmetrics shed light on the reception of scientific publications in news websites as well as in scientific blogs, policy papers, and other web-based content. This chapter deals with the current state of the art of altmetrics, focusing on the present discussion about the informative value of altmetrics. Furthermore, we investigate to what extent altmetrics can be used in scientific evaluations. We conclude our chapter with an outlook on the potential prospects for success of altmetrics in different fields of application.

Altmetrics – Nutzung, Eindrücke und Erfahrungen am Forschungszentrum Jülich

“…Inwiefern und in welcher Weise ist eine Anwendung von Altmetrics in der Wissenschaftspolitik und im Wissenschaftsmanagement sinnvoll? Diese Frage steht im Zentrum einer in Jülich erstellten Machbarkeitsstudie zu Altmetrics (Tunger, Meier & Hartmann, 2017). Wie werden Altmetrics bereits eingesetzt, zu welchen Aussagen kommt man und wo zeichnen sich Bottlenecks ab?…”

Are papers addressing certain diseases perceived where these diseases are prevalent? The proposal to use Twitter data as social-spatial sensors

“…Most of the studies correlating altmetrics and citations were interested in the question of the meaning of altmetrics: do altmetrics measure something similar or different as citations? Although altmetrics have been already used in the research evaluation practice [see e.g., 13 ], their meaning is not clear. Accordingly, these and similar statements can be frequently found in the scientometrics literature: “Yet at the moment, there is limited understanding of what precisely these indicators mean” [ 11 ].…”

“…Accordingly, these and similar statements can be frequently found in the scientometrics literature: “Yet at the moment, there is limited understanding of what precisely these indicators mean” [ 11 ]. “There is no uniform definition, and therefore no consensus on what exactly is measured by altmetrics and what conclusions can be drawn from the results” [ 13 , p. 124]. Since the meaning of altmetrics is not clear, the terms describing the measured impact varies: societal impact, public attention, non-scholarly popularity, diverse forms of impact, and non-traditional scholarly influence [ 5 , 14 , 15 ].…”

Visibilidad e impacto altmétrico de los investigadores de la Universidad de Antioquia: metodología aplicable a universidades

“…Dado el panorama anterior, en años recientes ha habido un interés creciente de la comunidad académica y científica en desarrollar mejores indicadores (Alperin, 2014;Tunger et al, 2018) que incluyan nuevos medios de comunicación de la ciencia y que permitan proyectarse en la perspectiva de vinculación. Ante esto, las altmetrics aparecen como una propuesta complementaria; sin embargo, se encuentran aún en un desarrollo inicial, especialmente cuando se las compara con los indicadores bibliométricos tradicionales, que llevan décadas de trabajo (Alperin, 2014).…”

“…Respecto a la literatura sobre el tema, ha aumentado considerablemente la publicación sobre altmetrics en los últimos años (Erdt et al, 2016;Tunger et al, 2018), principalmente se encuentran trabajos sobre el potencial de uso de estas métricas para la evaluación científica y la política científica (Weller, 2015;González-Valiente et al, 2016;Haustein, 2016;Tunger et al, 2018), la generación de nuevos indicadores (Torres-Salinas et al, 2013; Orduña-Malea; Martín-Martín; Delgado-López-Cózar, 2016), el análisis comparativo y de correlación con métricas tradicionales (Bar-Ilan, 2014;Bornmann, 2014;Costas et al, 2015;Karanatsiou et al, 2017;Alhuay-Quispe, 2017;Asemi;Heydari, 2018;Bornmann;Haunschild, 2018;Martin-Martin et al, 2018), la importancia de combinar y explotar datos de diversas fuentes de información (Thelwall et al, 2013;Erdt et al, 2016;Orduña-Malea;Martín-Martín, Delgado-López-Cózar, 2016;Sugimoto et al, 2017;Asemi;Heydari, 2018) y el funcionamiento de los agregadores altmétricos como Plum Analytics, Altmetric.com, ImpactStory, entre otros (Williams, 2017;Ortega, 2018).…”