Altmetircs Research: An Impact and Tools

History Of Altmetrcis

Dario Taraborelli published a paper on soft peer review, advocating social bookmarking tools for post-publication peer review (Taraborelli, 2008). Neylon and Wu described the PLOS Article-Level Metrics service launched in 2009 in an article published the same year (Neylon & Wu, 2009). Priem & Hemminger (2010) describes scientometrics 2.0 and called for new metrics based on Web 2.0 tools (Priem & Hemminger, 2010). Groth and Gurney studied chemistry science blogging about scholarly papers and presented their findings at the Web Science Conference 2010 (Groth & Gurney, 2010). The Altmetrics manifesto was published in October 2010 by Jason Priem, Dario Taraborelli, Paul Groth and Cameron Neylon (Priem et al. 2010).

Reader Meter is a web service that tracks the number of Mendeley readers of all papers of a particular author. Reader Meter was launched in late 2010 and is the first working Altmetrics service. The first Altmetrics workshop was in Altmetrics11, held at the ACM Web Science Conference 2011 Workshop in June 2011. Hackathons are an important part of Altmetrics history: a working prototype for Total Impact (now Impact Story) was put together at the Beyond Impact conference in May 2011, and the idea of the Science Card project started at the Science Online London conference in September 2011. Three of the 11 finalists of the Mendeley/PLOS Binary Battle programming contest in September 2011 were Altmetrics applications. In 2012, we saw the launch of several Altmetrics services, more publishers implementing Altmetrics for their journal articles, and an increasing number of presentations and workshops dedicated to Altmetrics.