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.