In an increasingly quantified world defined by clicks and shares, academic publishers are looking for ways to track mentions of their articles on social media and other online sources, tapping into a trend among scholars known as “altmetrics.”
One publisher that’s jumped in is the University of Michigan’s Michigan Publishing, which last year started a pilot project with Altmetric, a British company that scans blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other media outlets for mentions or citations of scholarly work. It then calculates an attention score, displayed as a circular badge called a “donut” that appears at the top of a journal article. This gives publishers and authors a snapshot of how much impact that article has had online. Readers who click on the donut see details of the score broken down by how many users tweeted, posted to Facebook, blogged, or otherwise wrote about that article. It also provides a world map showing where the attention is coming from.
Rebecca A. Welzenbach, director of strategic integration and partnerships for Michigan Publishing, oversees the project and says it is likely to continue after the pilot period. What’s interesting, she says, is that the actual score calculated by Altmetric has so far been less important than the data behind it. “What’s incredibly valuable is to drill down into looking for those mentions and seeing where the conversation was going on,” she says.
Ms. Welzenbach says Altmetric scores have been retroactively applied across Michigan’s 44 open-access journals as well as in Deep Blue, the institutional literature repository.
More than anything, she says, the data help her flag interesting conversations that have bubbled up online across its journals and to show scholars how useful altmetrics can be to them.
So far, the highest Altmetric score among Michigan Publishing’s journal articles belongs to a translated work about early Bengali women photographers, featured in the Trans-Asia Photography Review. The data behind the score of 130 show it has been tweeted 115 times and posted to Facebook 87 times since it was translated, in 2014.
In looking at the geographical data, Sandra A. Matthews, editor of the Review and an associate professor of film and photography at Hampshire College, says she was surprised to see most of the attention coming from India. “It’s thrilling for a historic piece about 19th-century work,” she says, adding that looking at the individual tweets allowed her to see that some users identified themselves as relatives of the photographers mentioned in the article.
Scott W.H. Young, a digital-initiatives librarian at Montana State University at Bozeman who has published in Michigan’s Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, says the data collected through Altmetric and Google Analytics have allowed him to better connect with those in his niche area of work. In one case, he was able to see on social media that another librarian applied his research to increase engagement of an email newsletter.
“The number itself is a window, it’s a doorway,” he says of the Altmetric score on his journal articles. “You have to go through the door to see what the context is.”
Mr. Young has also incorporated the data into his tenure portfolio as evidence for how his work has advanced his field.
He doesn’t advertise the Altmetric score, since it doesn’t yet carry much weight, but he uses the data to find tweets and blogs that mention his work. Then he takes screen shots of those sources and adds them to his portfolio.
Although the data can illuminate the context of modern scholarly conversation, Mr. Young is quick to say that Altmetric is not “exhaustive,” and what it offers is a general snapshot of the reach of his work.
Maria Bonn, editor of The Journal of Electronic Publishing, is still waiting to see the impact of altmetric data, but says its main benefit may be in connecting an author with new communities where conversation is taking place.
“It’s data, but I feel the same way about impact factors and citation counts,” she says, adding that there hasn’t yet been enough time to see patterns and make meaningful interpretations from the data.
But one clear value, says Ms. Bonn, a senior lecturer in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the timeliness with which it can show reach. “If a famous scholar in a field tweeted a link, did that have impact? We can check that,” she says.
Michigan Publishing is one of several university publishers to try out the Altmetric tool for journal content, along with Cambridge University Press, Liverpool University Press, Oxford University Press, and Rockefeller University Press.
But Michigan Publishing is the only publisher to experiment with book metrics, a process that Ms. Welzenbach says is still a work in progress.
The Altmetric service is designed for tracking the reach of journal articles rather than books, says Ms. Welzenbach, so there are some tweaks to be made before altmetrics can be applied to the university press. As Michigan moves forward with the tool, she hopes it will benefit authors by helping them discover, for example, where their books have been reviewed online.
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