Altmetrics – as an alternative measure of impact for scholarly research – are in the news. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) are researching and recommending metrics other than traditional journal impact factors for measuring scholarly impact.
Ernesto Priego writes in On Metrics and Research Assessment that article level metrics will be more important for “international public access and impact.”
The success of automated methods to obtain quantitative indicators of the reach, reception and use of scholarly outputs depends on our ability as scholarly communities to realise and develop the potential of the Web for scholarly communications.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) just wrapped up their ACM Web Science Conference Workshop in June 2014. Papers and presentations are available at the conference web site – altmetrics14: expanding impacts and metrics.
Librarians involved with scholarly communications and consulting with researchers can learn from 4 things every librarian should do with altmentrics. [Impact Story is a nonprofit, open-source webapp that helps scientists discover and share the full impact of their research – everything from citations to their articles to tweets about their software to downloads of their datasets. ]
The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) published their April/May 2013 bulletin on Altmetrics: What, Why and Where.
Lastly, Indiana Libraries provides us with 17 More essential Altmetrics Resources (the Library version.)
Now you know!