Do altmetrics point to the broader impact of research? An overview of benefits and disadvantages of altmetrics

By Lutz Bornmann. J. Informetrics, 2014

583 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Today, it is not clear how the impact of research on other areas of society than science should be measured. While peer review and bibliometrics have become standard methods for measuring the impact of research in science, there is not yet an accepted framework within which to measure societal impact. Alternative metrics (called altmetrics to distinguish them from bibliometrics) are considered an interesting option for assessing the societal impact of research, as they offer new ways to measure (public) engagement with research output. Altmetrics is a term to describe web-based metrics for the impact of publications and other scholarly material by using data from social media platforms (e.g. Twitter or Mendeley). This overview of studies explores the potential of altmetrics for measuring societal impact. It deals with the definition and classification of altmetrics. Furthermore, their benefits and disadvantages for measuring impact are discussed.

Subfields: Information Systems, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a7439c04f40d9d51c97d1b98fe82d2234470515

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In Information Systems

1. John C. Mingers
2. Loet Leydesdorff
3. Vincent Larivière
4. Cassidy R. Sugimoto
5. Ismael Rafols
6. Chaomei Chen
7. Ludo Waltman
8. Saif M. Mohammad

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Loet Leydesdorff
2. John C. Mingers
3. Cassidy R. Sugimoto
4. Ismael Rafols
5. Martin S. Meyer

In Statistics and Probability

1. S. Haustein
2. Vincent Larivière
3. John C. Mingers
4. Sam Work
5. Loet Leydesdorff
6. Cassidy R. Sugimoto
7. Ludo Waltman
8. Saif M. Mohammad

Citations in the corpus

• Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature (2016, background): “Tags were also influential in predicting shares on other social media sites (Bornmann, 2014b,).”
• A review of theory and practice in scientometrics (2015, methodology): “ts 8.1. Alternative metrics Although citations still form the core of scientometrics, the dramatic rise of social media has opened up many more channels for recording the impact of academic research (Bornmann, 2014; Konkiel & Scherer, 2013; Priem, 2014; Roemer & Borchardt, 2012). These go un”