AN OVERVIEW OF USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO MEASURE AND FILTER SCIENCE

Paul Groth@pgrothhttp://www.few.vu.nl/~pgroth

Thanks to: Jason Priem, Dario Taraborelli, Mike Thelwall, Peter van den Besselaar,the altmetrics community

OVERVIEW

• Contextualizing Altmetrics• Defining Altmetrics• An example study• Current status• Going forward

What should I read?

What’s important?

How am I doing?

A KEY INGREDIENT

•What should I read?•What’s important?•How am I doing?

Measuring Impact

CURRENT METHODS

Science Studies Methods

•Interviews

•Surveys

•Observations

•Bibliometrics

•Webometrics

Filter Failure

from jason priem

Faculty of Sciences

AND WHAT ABOUT THIS?

Scientists do more than write papers….

These leave traces on the web

WE CAN MEASURE

Downloads

Where readers read

Data citation

Social network diffusion

Slide reuse

Peer review contributions

Youtube views

…

Faculty of Sciences

ALTMETRICS

altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship.

Summarized in:

J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Alt-metrics: A manifesto, (v.1.0), 26 October 2010.

http://altmetrics.org/manifesto

Faculty of Sciences

EXAMPLE: Studying Scientific Discourse on the Web using Bibliometrics: A Chemistry Blogging Case Study.Groth and Gurney, WebScience 2010

...more immediateN

umbe

r of

Pos

ts

Difference in Age Between Post & Publication (Years)

water researchatmospheric chemistry

origins of life /chemistry

future of chemical fields

Faculty of Sciences

CURRENT STATUS: ACADEMIC

Very good work on usage metrics

Workshop at Web Science 2011

http://altmetrics.org/workshop2011/

PloS ONE Collection

http://altmetrics.org/plosone/

Paper collection:

http://www.mendeley.com/groups/586171/altmetrics/

Faculty of Sciences

CURRENT STATUS: TOOLS – PLOS & MENDELEY BINARY BATTLE

Faculty of Sciences

CURRENT STATUS: TOOLS

Faculty of Sciences

CURRENT STATUS: TOOLS

http://total-impact.org

Faculty of Sciences

QUESTIONS

• How do we know whether this measures true academic impact? • What sorts of new filters are necessary?• What kind of impact are we measuring?• At what level of aggregation (if any) are these metrics useful for?• Can we gain analysis by going for scale?• Can science maps help us overcome variance in our datasets?• How do we determine what population we are talking about?•….

Faculty of Sciences

CONCLUSION: WE ARE JUST STARTING

Reminder:

“It took approximately a generation (20 years) for bibliographic citation analysis to achieve acceptability as a measure of academic impact." (Vaughan and Shaw, 2003).