measure your impact

The next quick take session that I attended was on the basics of altmetrics.  The presenter noted that scholarly impact measures are based on activity in online tools and environments such as citations.  Metrics are a proxy for scholarly influence which take a long time to accumulate.  Negative considerations: journals could be hidden in subscription based journals; the metrics don't capture the publications overall impact and the challenge of variability in the measure tools themselves.

Altmetrics indicators:

• journal article use
• social media use - blogs, Twitter (# of Tweets about conference presentation), copy of article saved in Mendeley (# of saves)
• data and software use and re-use
• educational resource use and re-use - i.e.: slide share or Prezi 
• broader impacts for research (readership)

Caveat: how do weight each of these indicators, are they equal or are some weighted more heavily than others.

Altmetrics measures diverse impacts by various tools to track readership and impact, such as: academia.edu, CiteULike, F1000, Google Scholar, Mendeley and Zotero.  Items that add value to traditionally published content include: crowdsourced peer review, and the exposure of questions and comments via social media.

Altmetrics tools include Altmetrics.com, Plum Analytics, Mendeley, Impact Story (which considers citation patterns in a particular field) and ORCID (which is aiming to unify author profiles).