Altmetrics

A set of recommendations for assessing the quality of research, signed by a group of researchers, editors, publishers of scholarly journals

An ongoing collection of articles published in PLoS ONE on a range of topics related to altmetrics and research assessment

A series of articles addressing risks and benefits of using alternative metrics of research impact, how altmetrics are being used now, and where the field is going

What Article-Level Metrics are, why they matter, how they complement established utilities and metrics, and how they might be considered for use in the tenure and promotion process.

This study by Priem, Piwowar, and Hemminger explores the properties of altmetrics, sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science.

"Although scientists have traditionally been reluctant to engage in public communication at the expense of focusing on academic productivity, our survey of highly cited U.S. nano-scientists, paired with data on their social media use, shows that public communication, such as interactions with reporters and being mentioned on Twitter, can contribute to a scholar’s scientific impact." (Liang et al.)

"We investigate the journal impact factor, focusing on the applied mathematics category. We discuss impact factor manipulation and demonstrate that the impact factor gives an inaccurate view of journal quality, which is poorly correlated with expert opinion." (Arnold & Fowler)

Eager to find out what impact blogging and social media could have on the dissemination of her work, Melissa Terras took all of her academic research, including papers that have been available online for years, to the web and found that her audience responded with a huge leap in interest in her work.

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