Altmetrics

We had a guest lecturer, a PhD student, talk to us about Altmetrics. This was the first time I heard of the term. Suffice to say I was very interested in this lecture, so much so that I am doing a 5000 word essay on the subject. Natasha Langdown was very knowledgable on the subject. She patiently answered questions and explained concepts until we understood.

Altmetrics or 'alterative metrics' is a new and emerging field for measuring the use of scholarly articles.

What does this mean?

Intially (with metrics) if I wrote an article and had it published in a journal. Each time someone cites my article in their paper, thesis and so on, this would be physically counted. Often times this process has lost a lot of important counts because it is done manually and in the time it takes to publish the count, more people would have cited the article. Nowadays we can use Altmetrics to do this. 

More and more scholarly literature is published every year, so it can be a challenge to keep up with the developments in the field, much less the developments in other fields that might be of interest to you. Scholars have always used filters to choose what to read, perhaps preferring certain journals over others or taking the recommendations of colleagues. However, new ways of measuring scholarly output, called “altmetrics,” might provide better ways of picking out the most influential and important new scholarship.

Altmetrics, or “alternative metrics,” are an emerging field of new methods for measuring the use and importance of scholarly articles, particularly in the sciences. As opposed to more traditional bibliometrics, such as Impact Factor, altmetrics provide article-level data and are based on new electronic sources of information, such as number of downloads and page views from a publisher, repository or online reference manager like Mendeley, or the amount of discussion generated in online venues such as Twitter or blogs, video sites, slide shares, facebook and so on.