Evaluating the Impact of Altmetrics

Librarians, publishers, and researchers have long placed significant emphasis on journal metrics such as the impact factor. However, these tools do not take into account the impact of research outside of citations and publications. Altmetrics seek to describe the reach of scholarly activity across the Internet and social media to paint a more vivid picture of the scholarly landscape. In order to examine the impact of altmetrics on scholarly activity, it is helpful to compare these new tools to an existing method. Citation counts are currently the standard for determining the impact of a scholarly work, and two studies were conducted to examine the correlation between citation count and altmetric data. First, a set of highly cited papers was chosen across a variety of disciplines, and their citation counts were compared with the altmetrics generated from Total-Impact.org. Second, to evaluate the hypothesized increased impact of altmetrics on recently published articles, a set of articles published in 2011 were taken from a sampling of journals with high impact factors, both subscription-based and open access, and the altmetrics were then compared to their citation counts.长期以来，图书馆员、出版方与科研人员都极为重视影响因子（impact factor）这类期刊计量指标。然而，此类工具并未考量引用与发表之外的研究影响力。替代计量指标（altmetrics）旨在刻画学术活动在互联网与社交媒体中的传播范围，以更生动地展现学术生态全貌。为探究替代计量指标对学术活动的影响，将这类新兴工具与现有方法进行对比不失为有效路径。当前，引用量仍是衡量学术作品影响力的通用标准，为此研究团队开展两项实验以探究引用量与替代计量数据间的相关性。其一，从多学科领域选取高被引论文，将其引用量与Total-Impact.org生成的替代计量指标数据进行对比。其二，为验证“替代计量指标对新近发表论文的影响力更强”这一假设，研究团队从高影响因子期刊（涵盖订阅型与开放获取期刊）的抽样样本中选取2011年发表的论文，随后将其替代计量指标与引用量进行对比。