New Opportunities for Repositories in the Age of Altmetrics

For institutional repositories, alternative metrics reflecting online activity present valuable indicators of interest in their holdings that can supplement traditional usage statistics. A variable mix of built-in metrics is available through popular repository platforms: Digital Commons, DSpace and EPrints. These may include download counts at the collection and/or item level, search terms, total and unique visitors, page views and social media and bookmarking metrics; additional data may be available with special plug-ins. Data provide different types of information valuable for repository managers, university administrators and authors. They can reflect both scholarly and popular impact, show readership, reflect an institution's output, justify tenure and promotion and indicate direction for collection management. Practical considerations for implementing altmetrics include service costs, technical support, platform integration and user interest. Altmetrics should not be used for author ranking or comparison, and altmetrics sources should be regularly reevaluated for relevance

Educational Technology as Seen Through the Eyes of the Readers

In this paper, I present the evaluation of a novel knowledge domain visualization of educational technology. The interactive visualization is based on readership patterns in the online reference management system Mendeley. It comprises of 13 topic areas, spanning psychological, pedagogical, and methodological foundations, learning methods and technologies, and social and technological developments. The visualization was evaluated with (1) a qualitative comparison to knowledge domain visualizations based on citations, and (2) expert interviews. The results show that the co-readership visualization is a recent representation of pedagogical and psychological research in educational technology. Furthermore, the co-readership analysis covers more areas than comparable visualizations based on co-citation patterns. Areas related to computer science, however, are missing from the co-readership visualization and more research is needed to explore the interpretations of size and placement of research areas on the map.Comment: Forthcoming article in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learnin

Co-saved, co-tweeted, and co-cited networks

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley-Blackwell in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 14/05/2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24028 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Counts of tweets and Mendeley user libraries have been proposed as altmetric alternatives to citation counts for the impact assessment of articles. Although both have been investigated to discover whether they correlate with article citations, it is not known whether users tend to tweet or save (in Mendeley) the same kinds of articles that they cite. In response, this article compares pairs of articles that are tweeted, saved to a Mendeley library, or cited by the same user, but possibly a different user for each source. The study analyzes 1,131,318 articles published in 2012, with minimum tweeted (10), saved to Mendeley (100), and cited (10) thresholds. The results show surprisingly minor overall overlaps between the three phenomena. The importance of journals for Twitter and the presence of many bots at different levels of activity suggest that this site has little value for impact altmetrics. The moderate differences between patterns of saving and citation suggest that Mendeley can be used for some types of impact assessments, but sensitivity is needed for underlying differences

Mining, Modeling, and Leveraging Multidimensional Web Metrics to Support Scholarly Communities

The significant proliferation of scholarly output and the emergence of multidisciplinary research areas are rendering the research environment increasingly complex. In addition, an increasing number of researchers are using academic social networks to discover and store scholarly content. The spread of scientific discourse and research activities across the web, especially on social media platforms, suggests that far-reaching changes are taking place in scholarly communication and the geography of science. This dissertation provides integrated techniques and methods designed to address the information overload problem facing scholarly environments and to enhance the research process. There are four main contributions in this dissertation. First, this study identifies, quantifies, and analyzes international researchers’ dynamic scholarly information behaviors, activities, and needs, especially after the emergence of social media platforms. The findings based on qualitative and quantitative analysis report new scholarly patterns and reveals differences between researchers according to academic status and discipline. Second, this study mines massive scholarly datasets, models diverse multidimensional non-traditional web-based indicators (altmetrics), and evaluates and predicts scholarly and societal impact at various levels. The results address some of the limitations of traditional citation-based metrics and broaden the understanding and utilization of altmetrics. Third, this study recommends scholarly venues semantically related to researchers’ current interests. The results provide important up-to-the-minute signals that represent a closer reflection of research interests than post-publication usage-based metrics. Finally, this study develops a new scholarly framework by supporting the construction of online scholarly communities and bibliographies through reputation-based social collaboration, through the introduction of a collaborative, self-promoting system for users to advance their participation through analysis of the quality, timeliness and quantity of contributions. The framework improves the precision and quality of social reference management systems. By analyzing and modeling digital footprints, this dissertation provides a basis for tracking and documenting the impact of scholarship using new models that are more akin to reading breaking news than to watching a historical documentary made several years after the events it describes

Identifying the Invisible Impact of Scholarly Publications: A Multi-Disciplinary Analysis Using Altmetrics

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The field of ‘altmetrics’ is concerned with alternative metrics for the impact of research publications using social web data. Empirical studies are needed, however, to assess the validity of altmetrics from different perspectives. This thesis partly fills this gap by exploring the suitability and reliability of two altmetrics resources: Mendeley, a social reference manager website, and Faculty of F1000 (F1000), a post- publishing peer review platform. This thesis explores the correlations between the new metrics and citations at the level of articles for several disciplines and investigates the contexts in which the new metrics can be useful for research evaluation across different fields. Low and medium correlations were found between Mendeley readership counts and citations for Social Sciences, Humanities, Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Engineering articles from the Web of Science (WoS), suggesting that Mendeley data may reflect different aspects of research impact. A comparison between information flows based on Mendeley bookmarking data and cross-disciplinary citation analysis for social sciences and humanities disciplines revealed substantial similarities and some differences. This suggests that Mendeley readership data could be used to help identify knowledge transfer between scientific disciplines, especially for people that read but do not author articles, as well as providing evidence of impact at an earlier stage than is possible with citation counts. The majority of Mendeley readers for Clinical Medicine, Engineering and Technology, Social Science, Physics and Chemistry papers were PhD students and postdocs. The highest correlations between citations and Mendeley readership counts were for types of Mendeley users that often authored academic papers, suggesting that academics bookmark papers in Mendeley for reasons related to scientific publishing. In order to identify the extent to which Mendeley bookmarking counts reflect readership and to establish the motivations for bookmarking scientific papers in Mendeley, a large-scale survey found that 83% of Mendeley users read more than half of the papers in their personal libraries. The main reasons for bookmarking papers were citing in future publications, using in professional activities, citing in a thesis, and using in teaching and assignments. Thus, Mendeley bookmarking counts can potentially indicate the readership impact of research papers that have educational value for non-author users inside academia or the impact of research papers on practice for readers outside academia. This thesis also examines the relationship between article types (i.e., “New Finding”, “Confirmation”, “Clinical Trial”, “Technical Advance”, “Changes to Clinical Practice”, “Review”, “Refutation”, “Novel Drug Target”), citation counts and F1000 article factors (FFa). In seven out of nine cases, there were no significant differences between article types in terms of rankings based on citation counts and the F1000 Article Factor (FFa) scores. Nevertheless, citation counts and FFa scores were significantly different for articles tagged: “New finding” or “Changes to Clinical Practice”. This means that F1000 could be used in research evaluation exercises when the importance of practical findings needs to be recognised. Furthermore, since the majority of the studied articles were reviewed in their year of publication, F1000 could also be useful for quick evaluations

E-visibility of environmental sciences researchers at the University of South Africa

Abstract : Research e-visibility in theory enables a researcher to establish and maintain a digital research portfolio utilising various research e-profiles on a number of research online communities and platforms. E-visibility embodies the online presence of the researcher and their research, researcher’s discoverability via research e-profiles and the accessibility of research output on online research communities. The rationale for this study has its foundation in the premise that enhancing the e-visibility of a researcher will increase the research and societal impact of the researcher. The development of an e-visibility strategy for the School of Environmental Sciences (SES) at the University of South Africa (Unisa) would be instrumental in enhancing the e-visibility of the researchers. This study aims at establishing guidelines for the development of an e-visibility strategy for SES researchers at Unisa as part of research support via the Library services. Altmetric and bibliometric data of the SES researchers, were collected during the 2-year period (December 2014 and December 2017) and e-visibility surveys were conducted at the beginning of the study (December 2014) and at the end of the study (April 2017) as part of a longitudinal e-visibility study. The data was analysed using statistical methods to ascertain: 1) the SES researchers e-visibility status, 2) the SES researchers’ perceptions about e-visibility, 3) the altmetric-bibliometric correlations (relationships) from the altmetrics sourced from the academic social networking tools and the bibliometrics derived from the citation resources, and 4) identifying e-visibility practices and actions increasing research and societal impact. The results reflected a total increase in online presence, discoverability, and accessibility therefore indicating an overall increase in the actual and perceived e-visibility of the SES researchers. The survey conducted at the end of the study, found that 73% of the SES researchers indicating that their e-visibility increased with online presence being enhanced, 69% were more discoverable and 76% of their research output was more accessible after applying what they learnt during the e-visibility awareness and training...Ph.D. (Information Management