Genesis of Altmetrics or Article-level Metrics for Measuring Efficacy of Scholarly Communications: Current Perspectives

The article-level metrics (ALMs) or altmetrics becomes a new trendsetter in recent times for measuring the impact of scientific publications and their social outreach to intended audiences. The popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin and social bookmarks such as Mendeley and CiteULike are nowadays widely used for communicating research to larger transnational audiences. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment got signed by the scientific and researchers communities across the world. This declaration has given preference to the ALM or altmetrics over traditional but faulty journal impact factor (JIF)-based assessment of career scientists. JIF does not consider impact or influence beyond citations count as this count reflected only through Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database. Furthermore, JIF provides indicator related to the journal, but not related to a published paper. Thus, altmetrics now becomes an alternative metrics for performance assessment of individual scientists and their contributed scholarly publications. This paper provides a glimpse of genesis of altmetrics in measuring efficacy of scholarly communications and highlights available altmetric tools and social platforms linking altmetric tools, which are widely used in deriving altmetric scores of scholarly publications. The paper thus argues for institutions and policy makers to pay more attention to altmetrics based indicators for evaluation purpose but cautions that proper safeguards and validations are needed before their adoption

The Measurement of Intellectual Influence

We examine the problem of measuring influence based on the information contained in the data on the communications between scholarly publications, judicial decisions, patents, web pages, and other entities. The measurement of influence is useful to address several empirical questions such as reputation, prestige, aspects of the diffusion of knowledge, the markets for scientists and scientific publications, the dynamics of innovation, ranking algorithms of search engines in the World Wide Web, and others. In this paper we ask why any given methodology is reasonable and informative applying the axiomatic method. We find that a unique ranking method can be characterized by means of five axioms: anonymity, invariance to citation intensity, weak homogeneity, weak consistency, and invariance to splitting of journals. This method is easily implementable and turns out to be different from those regularly used in social and natural sciences, arts and humanities, and computer science.Intellectual Influence, Citations, Ranking Methods, Consistency.

Uncited articles and their effect on the concentration of citations

Empirical evidence demonstrates that citations received by scholarly publications follow a pattern of preferential attachment, resulting in a power-law distribution. Such asymmetry has sparked significant debate regarding the use of citations for research evaluation. However, a consensus has yet to be established concerning the historical trends in citation concentration. Are citations becoming more concentrated in a small number of articles? Or have recent geopolitical and technical changes in science led to more decentralized distributions? This ongoing debate stems from a lack of technical clarity in measuring inequality. Given the variations in citation practices across disciplines and over time, it is crucial to account for multiple factors that can influence the findings. This article explores how reference-based and citation-based approaches, uncited articles, citation inflation, the expansion of bibliometric databases, disciplinary differences, and self-citations affect the evolution of citation concentration. Our results indicate a decreasing trend in citation concentration, primarily driven by a decline in uncited articles, which, in turn, can be attributed to the growing significance of Asia and Europe. On the whole, our findings clarify current debates on citation concentration and show that, contrary to a widely-held belief, citations are increasingly scattered.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Social Media and Citation Metrics

Quantifying scholarly output via traditional citation metrics is the time-honored method to gauge academic success. However, as the tentacles of social media spread into professional personas, scholars are interacting more frequently and more meaningfully with these tools. Measuring the influence and impact of scholarly engagement with online tools and networks is gaining importance in academia today. Assessing the impact of a scholar’s work can be measured by evaluating several factors including the number of peer-reviewed publications, citations to these publications and the influence of the publications. These metrics take a relatively long time to accumulate, some are available only via subscription resources, and often measure influence only on a specific scientific community. While these accepted tools provide a means to weigh scholarly output, they do not tell the entire story. Increasingly, scholars are engaging with social media in a professional capacity. From following tweets of fellow conference attendees to hearing about newly published papers, researchers are becoming more reliant upon crowdsourced peer review. As the acceptance of social media and online tools has progressed, interest in employing these tools to gauge academic success has been amplified. There is some very interesting work being done on alternative scholarly metrics, or altmetrics (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylon, Cameron, 2010). Some of the more mature tools will be discussed, along with current research that connects social networks with citation metrics (Eysenbach, 2011). In addition, acceptance of these tools in scientific disciplines will be addressed, along with the methods that information professionals can use to help facilitate their use

Applied Evaluative Informetrics: Part 1

This manuscript is a preprint version of Part 1 (General Introduction and Synopsis) of the book Applied Evaluative Informetrics, to be published by Springer in the summer of 2017. This book presents an introduction to the field of applied evaluative informetrics, and is written for interested scholars and students from all domains of science and scholarship. It sketches the field's history, recent achievements, and its potential and limits. It explains the notion of multi-dimensional research performance, and discusses the pros and cons of 28 citation-, patent-, reputation- and altmetrics-based indicators. In addition, it presents quantitative research assessment as an evaluation science, and focuses on the role of extra-informetric factors in the development of indicators, and on the policy context of their application. It also discusses the way forward, both for users and for developers of informetric tools.Comment: The posted version is a preprint (author copy) of Part 1 (General Introduction and Synopsis) of a book entitled Applied Evaluative Bibliometrics, to be published by Springer in the summer of 201

A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments

A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections: Web of Science and Scopus Databases

Nowadays, the world’s scientific community has been publishing an enormous number of papers in different scientific fields. In such environment, it is essential to know which databases are equally efficient and objective for literature searches. It seems that two most extensive databases are Web of Science and Scopus. Besides searching the literature, these two databases used to rank journals in terms of their productivity and the total citations received to indicate the journals impact, prestige or influence. This article attempts to provide a comprehensive comparison of these databases to answer frequent questions which researchers ask, such as: How Web of Science and Scopus are different? In which aspects these two databases are similar? Or, if the researchers are forced to choose one of them, which one should they prefer? For answering these questions, these two databases will be compared based on their qualitative and quantitative characteristics

The pros and cons of the use of altmetrics in research assessment

© 2020 The Authors. Published by Levi Library Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: http://doi.org/10.29024/sar.10Many indicators derived from the web have been proposed to supplement citation-based indicators in support of research assessments. These indicators, often called altmetrics, are available commercially from Altmetric.com and Elsevier’s Plum Analytics or can be collected directly. These organisations can also deliver altmetrics to support institutional selfevaluations. The potential advantages of altmetrics for research evaluation are that they may reflect important non-academic impacts and may appear before citations when an article is published, thus providing earlier impact evidence. Their disadvantages often include susceptibility to gaming, data sparsity, and difficulties translating the evidence into specific types of impact. Despite these limitations, altmetrics have been widely adopted by publishers, apparently to give authors, editors and readers insights into the level of interest in recently published articles. This article summarises evidence for and against extending the adoption of altmetrics to research evaluations. It argues that whilst systematicallygathered altmetrics are inappropriate for important formal research evaluations, they can play a role in some other contexts. They can be informative when evaluating research units that rarely produce journal articles, when seeking to identify evidence of novel types of impact during institutional or other self-evaluations, and when selected by individuals or groups to support narrative-based non-academic claims. In addition, Mendeley reader counts are uniquely valuable as early (mainly) scholarly impact indicators to replace citations when gaming is not possible and early impact evidence is needed. Organisations using alternative indicators need recruit or develop in-house expertise to ensure that they are not misused, however