Altmetrics for the humanities Disciplines, output types, and discovery in the wild Jeremy L. McLaughlin, San Jose State University & Stacy Konkiel, altmetric.com SIG AH & SIG VIS Panel Presentation ASIST 2015 Annual Meeting What are altmetrics ? CC-BY Christopher A Dominic / Flickr Altmetrics as complements to citations Altmetrics Instant Scholarly, public, educational, political, economic & other impacts Apply to all scholarly outputs Citations Months to years Scholarly impact Apply mostly to articles Most altmetrics research to date studies the sciences is concerned with journal articles measures correlations with citations Humanities research is different Outputs Books Articles Textual datasets Poetry Reviews Exhibition catalogs Images Videos Audio files Measures of impact Prestige of press Peer-review status Prizes & awards Mass media contributions Presentations Sometimes citations Altmetrics are good for the humanities More engagement on Wikipedia (Ehman, Large & Beheshti, 2008) More likely to use social media in their research (Rowlands et al, 2011) Higher Mendeley readership than citation counts (Mohammadi & Thelwall, 2014) Higher coverage on social media than in citation databases (Haustein, Costas & Larivire, 2015) Humanities content from figshare 5,564 unique outputs 20 arts & humanities disciplines 9 document types (papers, posters, datasets) January 2012 to July 14, 2015 Humanities content from figshare Figshare output types NumberPercent Total Code 11.2 Dataset Figure Fileset Media 25.4 Paper Poster Presentation Thesis 551.0 Altmetric counts for humanities content 622 with social media attention 1,364 with figshare attention Final analysis = 1,467 3,578 outputs with no attention Year published # outputs on Figshare Percentage of outputs with Altmetric scores % % % % Altmetric counts for humanities content # likes% likes# down% downBlog #Blog %Twitter #Twitter %G+ #G+ %FB #FB % TOTAL % % %714.84% %614.16%463.14% Not used (low): Reddit, news sites, Wikipedia, and Sina Weibo Mendeley: Discrepancy in counts from Altmetric.com data source No counts: CiteULike, Faculty of 1000, Pinterest, etc Data Citation Index (DCI) no scores Characteristics of outputs with attention 27% of outputs with attention 31% likes 36% Tweeters 43% total downloads Characteristics of outputs with attention Most downloaded filesets & dataset Most blog mentions presentations Most tweeted posters & presentations Characteristics of outputs with attention Characteristics of outputs with attention (keywords) Takeaway for humanists Proactively engage with the right demographics on the right platforms Altmetrics for the humanities Disciplines, outputs, and discovery in the wild Thank you! Jeremy L. McLaughlin, San Jose State University Stacy Konkiel, altmetric.com Breaking traditional barriers: Collaboration, impact, and information technology in the humanities Thank you! Questions/Comments??