sigmet panel at asist: altmetrics - present and future
DESCRIPTION
Contribution to panel discussion at ASIST 2013 Annual Meeting in MontrealTRANSCRIPT
Altmetrics: Present and Future Panel discussion at ASIST 2013
Stefanie Haustein [email protected] @stefhaustein
Altmetrics: Present • Altmetrics are “representing very different things”
(Lin & Fenner, 2013)
• unclear what exactly they measure: scientific impact, social impact, buzz, or all of the above?
• ad-hoc classifications need to be confirmed by qualitative and more quantitative research
Altmetrics: Present • first studies show low to moderate positive
correlations with citations and disciplinary differences in uptake of various social media tools
• researchers and funders show interest in using social media counts to reflect broader impact
• tools aggregate and provide altmetrics
Altmetrics: Future • similar to development of SCI in the 1960s, social
media metrics have to be analyzed both from quantitative and qualitative perspective • qualitative studies to analyze who, how and why
people use various social media platforms • large-scale quantitative studies to determine
differences and biases in terms of disciplines, topics, document types, publications years, publication types and sources, author age and affiliation, etc.
Ø to find out what various social media metrics actually mean and what they can be used for
Altmetrics: Challenges • complex to define and classify tools and motivations
• scientific and non-scientific audiences cannot be determined merely on the platform used
• level of engagement differs not only between platforms but also within, e.g.: saving paper to Mendeley library vs. tweeting about it saving vs. reading and retweeting link vs. discussing content
Ø differentiation between audiences and engagements needs to be subject of future research
Altmetrics: Challenges scientist on Twitter tweeting scientific paper in non-scholarly manner: • Scientific impact? • Social impact? • Buzz?
Altmetrics: Challenges Mistakes are meant for learning, not repeating! • e.g.: Impact Factor
• short citation window and document type asymmetry go back to convenience and cost-efficiency and ad-hoc decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s
• 50 years later, DORA tries to reverse the dominance of impact factor use and misuse
Altmetrics: Challenges Mistakes are meant for learning, not repeating! • counting mentions of DOIs without knowing what is
missed • comparing social media counts subject to biases that are
not (yet) fully understood: • publication year • certain topics • social media presence of publishing authors
and journals • …
Altmetrics: Future • before applying social media counts in information
retrieval and research evaluation, we need: • qualitative and more quantitative studies to
understand and define the meaning of various social media counts
• more transparency and reliability in data aggregation
