Abstract
Numerous websites are currently being used by researchers for sharing and disseminating research, some of which are CiteULike, BibSonomy, Connotea, Mendeley, ResearchGate, etc. For measuring this data, scientists create alternative indicators related to traditional indicators like bibliometric indicators, scientometric indicators. The main purpose of these indicators is that with such huge amount of information available, some specific tools and techniques are required to filter and evaluate the research outcomes. These indicators reveal the societal and unknown impact of the work that traditional metrics are unable to do. The most prominent indicators for this purpose include Altmetrics or article metrics or alternative metrics. The detailed discussion is provided in this chapter.
TopAltmetrics
The growth of Web 2.0 tools especially Social Networks along with the widespread acceptance of electronic publishing, for dissemination and discussion of scientific literature, makes it possible to quantify the discussion of an article on blogs, podcasts, social media platforms, and news media – a phenomenon known as “Altmetrics” (Trueger et al., 2015). It was proposed in 2010 as a generalization of article level metrics. Altmetrics is derived particularly from the Social Web (Priem, et al., 2010), online scholarly sources (Neylon & Wu, 2009) and also from the general web (Almind & Ingwersen, 1997). It is considered to be the latest trend in the metric sciences and are considered as non-traditional metrics proposed as alternative to citation impact measures. It accounts to measure the research impact, article-downloads, mentions in social media, reads, profile view etc. An altmetric approach to assess research impact proves to be a useful indicator to assess the article level impact of researchers. The visibility of research increases using platforms like Research-Gate that apply altmetric indicators to assess the scientific research. As per (Adie & Roe, 2013) the promise of altmetrics is two-fold:
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Researchers and other stakeholders can use altmetrics data to derive with novel, relevant metrics better suited to situations not well aided by citation counts;
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This data may also turn as a leading indicator for current, traditional metrics like citation counts.