Page 15 - Becoming Metric Wise

4 Becoming Metric-Wise

knowledge is distributed in snippets or nano publications. Finally,
researchers often place new findings on their personal websites or in blogs
and annotate others’ work.
Altmetrics is a term referring to all metric techniques measuring new
forms of performing, discussing or communicating science, especially
through social media. It captures different forms of engagement with an
article, a scientist or theory. A clear advantage of these techniques is the
fact that they react on the spot and hence are able to map new tendencies
and reactions. Not surprisingly journals such as Nature immediately
reacted to this phenomenon (Piwowar, 2013).
This said, we think that the term altmetrics is a bad choice; its pro-
nunciation resembles “old” metrics, what is alternative today will cer-
tainly not be alternative in 10 years, and finally altmetrics is just a special
form of informetrics. Perhaps altmetrics should better be called social
influmetrics (Rousseau & Ye, 2013) or social media metrics (Haustein,
Costas, & Larivie ´re, 2015). Contemporary methods to describe and eval-
uate science should include new ways of science communication and the
social implications of communicating and performing scientific results.
Hence a multimetric approach is called for (Rousseau & Ye, 2013).
Aspects of impact captured by altmetrics include (Lin & Fenner, 2013;
Taylor, 2013):
Viewed—HTML or PDF views on a website, often this is a publisher’s website
but other websites may also provide view data.
Discussed—in science blogs, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and similar social
media.
Saved—Mendeley, CiteULike and other social bookmark sites.
Recommended (formal endorsement)—a metric used for example by
F1000Prime.
Cited—altmetrics also adopts citations in secondary and other knowledge
sources, such as number of times a paper has been referenced by Wikipedia.
If one has access to the data, one can make a distinction between
“viewed by other scholars” and “viewed by the public.” A similar distinc-
tion could be made for the other actions. Sometimes altmetrics is
described as the metrics of the computerization of the research process.
We do not agree with this as the step of including the computerization of
the research process already happened when the term informetrics was
introduced. Clearly altmetrics is a subfield of informetrics.
In standard citation studies, the citing population coincides with the
cited population in the sense that authors cite authors. This clearly is usu-
ally not the case in altmetric studies. A tweeter can be just that. If