Contribution to panel discussion at ASIST 2013 Annual Meeting in Montreal

1. Altmetrics: Present and Future
Panel discussion at ASIST 2013
Stefanie Haustein
stefanie.haustein@umontreal.ca
@stefhaustein

2. Altmetrics: Present
• Altmetrics are “representing very different things”
(Lin & Fenner, 2013)
• unclear what exactly they measure:
scientific impact, social impact, buzz, or all of the above?
• ad-hoc classifications need to be confirmed by
qualitative and more quantitative research

3. Altmetrics: Present
• first studies show low to moderate positive
correlations with citations and disciplinary
differences in uptake of various social media tools
• researchers and funders show interest in using
social media counts to reflect broader impact
• tools aggregate and provide altmetrics

4. Altmetrics: Future
• similar to development of SCI in the 1960s, social
media metrics have to be analyzed both from
quantitative and qualitative perspective
• qualitative studies to analyze who, how and why
people use various social media platforms
• large-scale quantitative studies to determine
differences and biases in terms of disciplines, topics,
document types, publications years, publication types
and sources, author age and affiliation, etc.
Ø to find out what various social media metrics actually
mean and what they can be used for

5. Altmetrics: Challenges
• complex to define and classify tools and motivations
• scientific and non-scientific audiences cannot be
determined merely on the platform used
• level of engagement differs not only between
platforms but also within, e.g.:
saving paper to Mendeley library vs. tweeting about it
saving vs. reading and retweeting link vs. discussing content
Ø differentiation between audiences and
engagements needs to be subject of future research

6. Altmetrics: Challenges
scientist on
Twitter tweeting
scientific paper
in non-scholarly
manner:
• Scientific impact?
• Social impact?
• Buzz?

7. Altmetrics: Challenges
Mistakes are meant for learning, not repeating!
• e.g.: Impact Factor
• short citation window and document type asymmetry
go back to convenience and cost-efficiency and adhoc decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s
• 50 years later, DORA tries to reverse the dominance
of impact factor use and misuse

8. Altmetrics: Challenges
Mistakes are meant for learning, not repeating!
• counting mentions of DOIs without knowing what is
missed
• comparing social media counts subject to biases that are
not (yet) fully understood:
• publication year
• certain topics
• social media presence of publishing authors
and journals
• …

9. Altmetrics: Future
• before applying social media counts in information
retrieval and research evaluation, we need:
• qualitative and more quantitative studies to
understand and define the meaning of various
social media counts
• more transparency and reliability in data aggregation

10. Thank you for your attention!
Stefanie Haustein
stefanie.haustein@umontreal.ca
@stefhaustein