Altmetrics for e rand l 2015
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Examines the usefulness of altmetrics to the academic library for collection development and assessment. Discusses their advantages and disadvantages relative to more traditional metrics, and proposes some specific uses to which academic libraries may put altmetrics in support of the transitions now occurring in scholarly communication.
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Altmetrics for e rand l 2015
- 1. Using Altmetrics in Academic Libraries ER&L, February 25, 2015 Sarah W. Sutton ssutton3@emporia.edu @sarahwws
- 2. Altmetrics = Alternative metrics “Metrics that are alternative to the established citation counts and usage stats and/or metrics about alternative research outputs as opposed to journal articles” (NISO, 2014, p. 4)
- 3. Overview • Definitions • Evaluation • Discovery • Advantages & disadvantages
- 4. Evaluation • Collection development & management • Library publishing • Repositories • Research support • Return on investment & Institutional advancement
- 5. Collection development “If you’re a librarian and you have a limited serials budget, knowing which publications are read by your patrons can help you make better decisions about where you subscribe. Finding out what researchers are interested in and talking about with one another can help steer you into new areas for acquisition, letting you meet their needs before they even know they have them” (Crotty, 2014, p.145) “providing an altmetric overlay for journal usage that will complement the standard COUNTER statistics provided by publishers” (Galligan & Dyas-Corriea, 2013)
- 8. Library Publishing & Repositories • Altmetrics as a measure of OA content • Promote repository content • Persuade depositors • Persuade funders • Measure community engagement
- 9. Repository platforms providing altmetrics Metric Digital Commons DSPace Eprints Download counts x x x Search terms x Referral links x Metrics communicated by email x Includes a federated search & discovery x Number of visitors x Pageviews x Bounce rate x Partnership with Almtetric.com x Citation metrics x* x** x** Social media mentions x* x** * via Almetric.com ** with additional plug-in Source: Konkiel & Sherer (2013)
- 10. Researcher support Libraries have a “"long-standing tradition of collaborating with academic departments and their research faculty to demonstrate the impact of their scholarship” (ACRL, 2014).
- 11. Researcher support • Who is interacting with a scholar’s research output? • What kinds of content are popular? • How is a scholar’s work being received by her peers? • Fully documenting publication in non- traditional venues & non-traditional forms of research out-put • Leverage publication for promotion & tenure
- 12. ROI & Institutional Advancement “Libraries are in a unique position to help facilitate an informed dialogue with the various constituencies that will intersect with altmetrics on campus” (Lapinski, Piwowar, & Priem, 2013).
- 13. ROI & Institutional Advancement • Showcase institutional scholarship to internal and external stakeholders • Demonstrate the impact of faculty research to trustees, state legislatures, etc. • Recruitment of faculty & students • Illustrate the potential impact of donations
- 14. Discovery “Altmetrics can play an important role as a discovery tool, in particularly for newly published content where citations are not yet available” (NISO, 2014, p. 7)
- 15. Discovery • Identifying scholarly content – In unconventional formats – Recently published • Identifying creators of scholarly content • Contextualized altmetrics
- 16. Limitations • Gaming • Popularity v. impact • Replication • Complete data • Data reliability • Critical mass • Inapplicable to traditional publishing formats • Imperfect proxies of quality • Lack of peer-review or its equivalent • “Fire-hose of data” (Crotty, 2014) • No “one-stop shop”…yet
- 17. FMI
- 18. References • ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee. (2014). Top trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education. College & Research Libraries News, 75(6), 294–302. • Crotty, D. (2014a). Altmetrics: Finding meaningful needles in the data haystack. Serials Review, 40(3), 141–146. doi:10.1080/00987913.2014.947839 • Crotty, D. (2014b, May 1). Altmetrics: Mistaking the means for the end. Retrieved from http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/05/01/altmetrics-mistaking-the-means-for-the-end/ • Galligan, F., & Dyas-Correia, S. (2013). Altmetrics: Rethinking the way we measure. Serials Review, 39(1), 56–61. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2013.01.003 • Haustein, S., Peters, I., Sugimoto, C. R., Thelwall, M., & Larivière, V. (2013). Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature. arXiv:1308.1838 [cs]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1838 • Konkiel, S. (2013). Altmetrics a 21st-century solution to determining research quality. Online Searcher, 37(4), 11–15. • Konkiel, S., & Scherer, D. (2013). New opportunities for repositories in the age of altmetrics. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 39(4), 22–26. • Lapinski, S., Piwowar, H., & Priem, J. (2013). Riding the crest of the altmetrics wave. College & Research Libraries News, 74(6), 292–300. • NISO. (2014). NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Project. Retrieved from http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/ • Sutton, S. (2013). A model for electronic resources value assessment. Serials Librarian, 64(1-4), 245–253. doi:10.1080/0361526X.2013.760417
- 19. Using Altmetrics in Academic Libraries Please feel free to contact me: Sarah W. Sutton ssutton3@emporia.edu @sarahwws
Editor's Notes
- Good morning everyone, I’m so pleased to be here today to update you on my on-going research on competencies for electronic resources librarians. I’m so sorry to not be there in person, as some of you might know, a few weeks ago in Chicago I fell down some steps and broke my ankle. I’m grateful to the conference organizers for taking the trouble to arrange for me to present to you remotely.
- They probably already know what altmetrics are if for no other reason than that there have already been several sessions at this conference about them. It’s used in in the context of scholarship and scholarly or creative output. They’ve probably also already learned that, although this definition is broad, and that the key term is alternative. They may not have noticed that alternative is used in two ways. First, sometimes we mean metrics that are alternatives to traditional measures of scholarship and scholarly output, for example Journal Impact Factors or citation counts. But other times, we also might mean measures of alternatives to traditional scholarly outputs and/or communication channels.. For example, research data sets, scientific software, posters and conference presentations, performance (film, theatre, music), blogs, lectures, online classes, teaching activities (NISO, 2014), or learning objects. Monday morning, in his update on the NISO Altemtrics project with Nettie LaGace, Todd Carpenter started his presentation by suggesting that alternative we shouldn't consider them alternative anymore, metrics are metrics. The important thing is that we now have the tools to measure what we really want to measure.
- My goals this morning are to take you through a brief definition of altmetrics which I’ve already done, and then to talk about some of the ways altmetrics can and are being put to use in academic libraries. Those ways seem to fall into two broad categories, they’re being used as tools for evaluation but they’re also being used or can be used as tools for discovery. As I move through and give you some examples of both categories, I’ll mention some of the advantages and disadvantages that altmetrics have.
- Evaluation is the more obvious of these two broad categories of uses to which altmetrics are being put. It seems to be the one that is the focus of a lot of the current research being done in relation to altmetrics. In the context of scholarship and scholarly output, evaluation is often synonymous with quality or impact. Two “flavors” of impact: popularity and quality. It’s important to
- Advantages: capturing captures, mentions, social media, open forum reviews, bookmarks, tweets, etc. are where you find out what researchers are interested in. Provide a more complete view of peer response to scholarly output Speed: data appears in days or weeks rather than months or years Altmetrics are flexible and adaptable so that a library could determine what communication channels are being used on their campus and customize a set of metrics
- A evaluation and assement model I developed while working as an ERL about five years ago and into which altemtrics fit quite nicely at both levels of the model.
- But collection development is not the only area in which academic libraries can make use of altmetrics. Studies have shown that for OA content, traditional measures of scholarly impact (citations) are often closely related to altmetrics measures (social reference management bookmarks) and that for a variety of reasons some scholarly altmetrics can be a better indicator of impact than traditional usage statistics [6], [7], [8].As supplementary metrics, scholarly altmetrics can prove value for OA content, including content held by repositories. Repository administrators can use usage statistics to help promote similar content within their institutional repositories (IR), supplement their collection development policies and provide evidence to university administration as to the impact of their university’s intellectual output [2]. Using altmetrics, some repositories have been successfully able to showcase the social importance of repository content to the general public in non-academic settings [3]. Repository managers can use altmetrics to persuade potential depositors that there is value in making their content openly accessible. As Harnad contends, “The prospect of increasing their usage and citation metrics (and their attendant rewards) is an incentive to researchers to provide OpenAccess to their findings.” [4, p. 6] The possibility of increasing altmetrics counts would arguably have a similar effect on deposit rates. Gathering numbers beyond general usage statistics can better communicate to repository funders – most often, university administrators – the value of the repository as a platform for hosting OA content.While general usage statistics might not tell a very informative story about the impact of a particular repository deposit, seeing how content is used and shared (on which websites, by which demographics and for what purposes) can. Similarly, by tracking non-academic use of content, repository managers can build a case for community engagement.
- But collection development is not the only area in which academic libraries can make use of altmetrics. Studies have shown that for OA content, traditional measures of scholarly impact (citations) are often closely related to altmetrics measures (social reference management bookmarks) and that for a variety of reasons some scholarly altmetrics can be a better indicator of impact than traditional usage statistics [6], [7], [8].As supplementary metrics, scholarly altmetrics can prove value for OA content, including content held by repositories.
- including both researchers (students and faculty) and the academic administrative office (faculty affairs research and grants, promotion and tenure committees, and so on). Librarians can provide this support in three main ways: informing emerging conversations with the latest research, supporting experimentation with emerging altmetrics tools, and engaging in early altmetrics education and outreach.
- including both researchers (students and faculty) and the academic administrative office (faculty affairs research and grants, promotion and tenure committees, and so on). Librarians can provide this support in three main ways: informing emerging conversations with the latest research, supporting experimentation with emerging altmetrics tools, and engaging in early altmetrics education and outreach. Many altmetrics tracking services, including Altmetric.com and ImpactStory, not only document basic usage statistics, but also capture information about readers and how they use content. For example, ImpactStory’s inclusion of Topsy (a Twitter feed archiving platform) metrics’ links to the individual tweets that mention specific articles showcases not only who is reading and sharing scholarship, but also what they are saying about it. Altmetric.com’s content dashboard also showcases sophisticated demographic reports for readers. Giving authors insight into their readership can help them better understand how their OA content stored in IRs is making an impact.
- For some of the same reasons and in some of the same ways as they do for individual researchers. Argues for the use of metrics provided by repository software for reporting ROI, etc. on institutional investment in both the repositories themselves and the research that is continued within and made available through the repository.
- ROI on institutional investment in researchers and research projects. Value of Altmetrics to University Administrators 6. Administrators can use altmetrics as supplementary indicators of impact when showcasing university scholarship to both internal and external stakeholders. In particular, tracking altmetrics alongside traditional metrics can shed light on impact for university trustees and state legislatures when requesting budget increases, recruiting faculty, etc. [5]. institutional advancement: relaying to potential donors when your institution is mentioned in the news media or popular science blogs (Crotty, 2014)
- Researchers and librarians also use metrics for discovery, this is nothing new. For instance, “Wben filtering tbrougb searcb results on a database, it is useful to sort results by citation counts to understand wbicb publications are tbe most highly regarded on a particular topic” (Konkiel, 2013). Metrics remain a powerful discovery tool, altmetrics certainly have a place in discovery, although their use isn’t common knowledge among researchers, faculty, and students.
- Unconventional formats like data sets, data sets, scientific software, posters and conference presentations, performance (film, theatre, music), blogs, lectures, online classes, teaching activitie "big data," e.g. the ability to track behavior (like page clicks or downloads), data, to "spot trends and make informed decisions based on deep quantitative evidence" (58). for a grad students social bookmarking (e.g. Mendeley) would be effective for keeping up with what’s new in their area of research or a researcher who’s managing their reputation (e.g. keeping up with what’s being said about their research) (Crotty, 2014) Because of the potential of new metrics in discovery tools is particularly of interest to publishers who are always interested in expanding markets interested in their content” (NISO, 2014, p. 14) “Altmetrics for scholarly content in unconventional formats can help end users better understand whether that research is worthwhile. Similarly, altmetrics can apply not only to scholarship but also to researchers, departments, universities, and even nations to help determine the top experts on any given subject” (Konkiel, 2013, sec. Improving traditional search habits) contextualized altmetrics has the potential to “instantly weed out the articles that are being referenced because of their low quality” ” (Konkiel, 2013, sec. Improving traditional search habits). Altmetrics also offer something that citation counts cannot: contextualized metrics. While rote counts of citations do little to help the end-user understand whether an article is high-quality, altmetrics can offer context through the wonders of text mining. Though still in its infancy, contextualized altmetrics services that support search could become the Next Big Thing, as they can instantly weed out the articles that are being referenced because of their low quality.
- Beyond the most obvious limitation of altmetrics: that they are suseptible to manipulation or gaming, and the need to distinguish between popularity and actual positive scholarly impact, Ar- ticles receive citations for a number of reasons, including vanity (self citations), politics (bonorary citations for a wellrespected scbolar), and refutation (positing tbat tbe original autbor's bypotbesis is incorrect). several other limitations to their use must be born in mind: Replication is a challenge particularly to research on altmetrics. Simply put, research results gain weight and authority through replication. But both the data sources and the technology that drives altmetrics is changing so quickly that replication has become more difficult. Between digital documents without URIs or DOIs, to casual references to items of scholarship that don’t include those identifiier and/or to documents that exist in multiple versions, it’s still very difficult to collect complete data. In the same vein, it is still not clear whether it actually possible to collect and document, for instance, that in any particular instance all of the mentions of an item of scholarly output. Even if you restrict your search to one communications venue like Twitter. Add to that the speed with which communication venues come and go. Some researchers have pointed out that in many disciplines, altmetrics can be called into question because so few members of that discipline are contributing to them. In fact, that may well result in biased altmetrics, biased toward those in a discipline who are using social media So far, altmetrics are less easily applied to traditional venues of scholarly communication such as books, book chapters, and art works. It is argued by some that altmetrics are, for some of the reasons I’ve described here, are imperfect proxies for quality just as more traditional metrics are. In particular, the lack of peer-review, which lends authority and a standardized measure quality to items of scholarly output that are subjected to it. The “fire-hose of data” is one of my favorite analogies in the literature of altmetrics. It refers to the multiplicity of sources of metrics for measuring the quality of research output. It can be viewed as a limitation, but I prefer to think of it as an advantage, which leads to the last point: A current disadvantage of altmetric tools is that "There is no one-stop shop for everything because altmetrics are only beginning to be developed on a larger scale as well as to be accepted by a wider cross-section of the research community" (57). This last is something that librarians can fix or at least contribute to a solution for by working with vendors of altmetrics like PlumbAnalytics/Ebsco and altmtric.com, conveying to them what a useful product would look like to them, what features it might have, etc.
- Scott Carpenter mentioned the overwhelming volume of information about altmetrics out there. Where to start? Here are some sources for keeping up with the plethora of information out there about altmetrics.