Analysis of ALM data for scholarly research, while still relatively new, is a growing enterprise, critical to ensuring consistent, appropriate usage of the metrics. A community made of bibliometricians; librarians; and researchers is building on decades of citation analysis, broadening the traditional focus to better understand the activity captured across the various channels of research engagement available today online.
Collections
PLOS ONE Altmetrics Collection: a PLOS ONE collection og papers to seed further study and use of altmetrics. It covers a range of subjects including statistical analysis of altmetrics data sources; metric validation, and identification of biases in measurements; validation of models of scientific discovery/recommendation based on altmetrics; qualitative research describing the scholarly use of online tools and environments; empirically-supported theory guiding altmetrics’ uses; and other research relating to scholarly impact in online tools and environments. The Collection is open for continued submissions across these areas.
Publications
The following set of articles represent only a subset of the growing body of work on ALM:
What Can Article-Level Metrics Do For You? by Martin Fenner. This editorial explains why article-level metrics are an important extension of traditional citation-based journal metrics and provide a number of example from ALM data collected for PLOS Biology.
The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers’ citations in the digital age by George A. Lozano, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras.
Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact by J Priem, H Piwowar, and B Hemminger, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil and National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). Using correlation and factor analysis, the results in this study suggest that citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone.
The Spread of Scientific Information: Insights from the Web Usage Statistics in PLOS Article-Level Metrics by K Yan and M Gerstein, Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University, U.S.A. This peer reviewed articles in PLOS ONE details correlation studies, usage decay patterns, and other analyses of the PLOS article Level Metrics data set.
Mutable Mobiles: Online Journals and the Evolving Genre Ecosystem of Science by C Casper, Department of Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media, North Carolina State University, USA. This dissertation uses both quantitative and qualitative/critical methods to analyze possible new interactions between online texts that differ from those of print texts.
Analysis: Correlating the PLOS Article-level metrics by L Juhl Jensen, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, Copenhagen. This blog post analyses how various categories of metrics (such as bookmarks, blog posts, citations, downloads, ratings and trackbacks) correlate with each other. Interestingly, the author finds that after downloads, bookmarks have the next highest correlation with citations.
Scholarly Conferences
- Altmetrics11
- Altmetrics12
- ALM Workshop 2012: workshop technical report
- ALM Workshop 2013: workshop presentations links to post-workshop write-ups from the community are available