Promoting research with altmetrics

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In contrast to traditional indicators, new, alternative metrics (altmetrics) capture the immediate discussion of research results in (social) media and allow researchers to track who is talking about their publications, where and how.

Traditional indicators of research impact are e.g. the number of peer-reviewed publications (as first, last, or corresponding author) or the h-index for researchers and the impact factor for journals (JIF). However, it may take years after the publication of an article before these indicators can be calculated. And the significance of a publication outside the scientific community is not recorded.

In the meantime, the way research results are handled has changed a lot. Researchers publish not only articles and books, but also data sets, codes, preprints, or conference papers. Results and publications are immediately shared on blogs or social media such as Twitter. Therefore, new alternative metrics (altmetrics) have been introduced that track online activities and collect data quickly (within days or weeks).

Altmetric

Altmetric checks online activities in relation to publications (e.g. mentions in blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit,…). There, the citations are counted and weighted according to the source and displayed in different colours as a donut. In addition, the Altmetric Attention Score is calculated. To have these values displayed for an article, a bookmarklet must be installed. Altmetrics are also displayed for articles in ZORA.

PlumX Metrics

The PlumX Metrics work in a similar way. Online activities are counted in five categories: usage, captures (e.g. bookmarks), social media, mentions and citations. PlumX Metrics ist available on Scopus and other Elsevier products.

With both products, you can not only see how often a publication has been shared or mentioned, but you can also look at who is talking about it and in what context.

Promote your own research

There are various ways to “promote” one’s own research on the internet, such as sharing on Twitter, blog posts, videos, or podcasts. But do such activities also result in more citations? Some papers show correlations here; in one study original articles were randomised into two groups, one of which was tweeted through a journal network (and the other served as a control). Here, a causal relationship was shown: tweeting led to more citations.

The presentation on the talk, which was given at a Lunch & Learn Open Science event, is available here.

Sabine Klein, Innovation and Communication