Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: a review of the literature
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paper_title: Relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators across academic social sites: The case of CSIC's members

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This study explores the connections between social and usage metrics (altmetrics) and bibliometric indicators at the author level. It studies to what extent these indicators, gained from academic sites, can provide a proxy for research impact. Close to 10,000 author profiles belonging to the Spanish National Research Council were extracted from the principal scholarly social sites: ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Mendeley and academic search engines: Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar Citations. Results describe little overlapping between sites because most of the researchers only manage one profile (72%). Correlations point out that there is scant relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators at author level. This is due to the almetric ones are site-dependent, while the bibliometric ones are more stable across web sites. It is concluded that altmetrics could reflect an alternative dimension of the research performance, close, perhaps, to science popularization and networking abilities, but far from citation impact.
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paper_title: User Participation in an Academic Social Networking Service: A Survey of Open Group Users on Mendeley

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Although there are a number of social networking services that specifically target scholars, little has been published about the actual practices and the usage of these so-called academic social networking services ASNSs. To fill this gap, we explore the populations of academics who engage in social activities using an ASNS; as an indicator of further engagement, we also determine their various motivations for joining a group in ASNSs. Using groups and their members in Mendeley as the platform for our case study, we obtained 146 participant responses from our online survey about users' common activities, usage habits, and motivations for joining groups. Our results show that a participants did not engage with social-based features as frequently and actively as they engaged with research-based features, and b users who joined more groups seemed to have a stronger motivation to increase their professional visibility and to contribute the research articles that they had read to the group reading list. Our results generate interesting insights into Mendeley's user populations, their activities, and their motivations relative to the social features of Mendeley. We also argue that further design of ASNSs is needed to take greater account of disciplinary differences in scholarly communication and to establish incentive mechanisms for encouraging user participation.
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paper_title: Groups in Mendeley: Owners' descriptions and group outcomes

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Using four factors borrowed from traditional social group theories, we examined owners' group descriptions in Mendeley to study the applicability of traditional social group theories for large, loosely-formed online groups. We manually annotated the descriptions for 529 Mendeley groups, and correlated the appearances of the factors with two measures of the groups' outcomes: the changes in the numbers of group members and the changes of the articles shared within the groups between 2011 and 2012. Our results suggest that, in general, all four factors are important in online groups, which indicates the usefulness of traditional group theories in the study of online groups. In addition, although a majority of the factors have helped the growth of group size being higher than average increase, several factors have caused the increase of the shared articles within the groups to be smaller than average increase.
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paper_title: Do highly cited researchers successfully use the social web?

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Academics can now use the web and the social websites to disseminate scholarly information in a variety of different ways. Although some scholars have taken advantage of these new online opportunities, it is not clear how widespread their uptake is or how much impact they can have. This study assesses the extent to which successful scientists have social web presences, focusing on one influential group: highly cited researchers working at European institutions. It also assesses the impact of these presences. We manually and systematically identified if the European highly cited researchers had profiles in Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Mendeley, Academia and LinkedIn or any content in SlideShare. We then used URL mentions and altmetric indicators to assess the impact of the web presences found. Although most of the scientists had an institutional website of some kind, few had created a profile in any social website investigated, and LinkedIn--the only non-academic site in the list--was the most popular. Scientists having one kind of social web profile were more likely to have another in many cases, especially in the life sciences and engineering. In most cases it was possible to estimate the relative impact of the profiles using a readily available statistic and there were disciplinary differences in the impact of the different kinds of profiles. Most social web profiles had some evidence of uptake, if not impact; nevertheless, the value of the indicators used is unclear.
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paper_title: Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites

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The rapid rise in popularity of online social networking has been followed by a slew of services aimed at an academic audience. This project sought to explore network structure in these sites, and to explore trends in network structure by surveying participants about their use of sites and motivations for making connections. Social network analysis revealed that discipline was influential in defining community structure, while academic seniority was linked to the position of nodes within the network. The survey revealed a contradiction between academics use of the sites and their position within the networks the sites foster. Junior academics were found to be more active users of the sites, agreeing to a greater extent with the perceived benefits, yet having fewer connections and occupying a more peripheral position in the network.
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paper_title: Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

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Altmetrics, indices based on social media platforms and tools, have recently emerged as alternative means of measuring scholarly impact. Such indices assume that scholars in fact populate online social environments, and interact with scholarly products in the social web. We tested this assumption by examining the use and coverage of social media environments amongst a sample of bibliometricians examining both their own use of online platforms and the use of their papers on social reference managers. As expected, coverage varied: 82 % of articles published by sampled bibliometricians were included in Mendeley libraries, while only 28 % were included in CiteULike. Mendeley bookmarking was moderately correlated (.45) with Scopus citation counts. We conducted a survey among the participants of the STI2012 participants. Over half of respondents asserted that social media tools were affecting their professional lives, although uptake of online tools varied widely. 68 % of those surveyed had LinkedIn accounts, while Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate each claimed a fifth of respondents. Nearly half of those responding had Twitter accounts, which they used both personally and professionally. Surveyed bibliometricians had mixed opinions on altmetrics' potential; 72 % valued download counts, while a third saw potential in tracking articles' influence in blogs, Wikipedia, reference managers, and social media. Altogether, these findings suggest that some online tools are seeing substantial use by bibliometricians, and that they present a potentially valuable source of impact data.
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paper_title: Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge.

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The 4th revolution after speech, writing and print, is skywriting (email, hypermail, web-based archiving).
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paper_title: Can Mendeley bookmarks reflect readership? A survey of user motivations

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Although Mendeley bookmarking counts appear to correlate moderately with conventional citation metrics, it is not known whether academic publications are bookmarked in Mendeley in order to be read or not. Without this information, it is not possible to give a confident interpretation of altmetrics derived from Mendeley. In response, a survey of 860 Mendeley users shows that it is reasonable to use Mendeley bookmarking counts as an indication of readership because most 55% users with a Mendeley library had read or intended to read at least half of their bookmarked publications. This was true across all broad areas of scholarship except for the arts and humanities 42%. About 85% of the respondents also declared that they bookmarked articles in Mendeley to cite them in their publications, but some also bookmark articles for use in professional 50%, teaching 25%, and educational activities 13%. Of course, it is likely that most readers do not record articles in Mendeley and so these data do not represent all readers. In conclusion, Mendeley bookmark counts seem to be indicators of readership leading to a combination of scholarly impact and wider professional impact.
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paper_title: Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities: Research evaluation and knowledge flows 1

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Although there is evidence that counting the readers of an article in the social reference site, Mendeley, may help to capture its research impact, the extent to which this is true for different scientific fields is unknown. In this study, we compare Mendeley readership counts with citations for different social sciences and humanities disciplines. The overall correlation between Mendeley readership counts and citations for the social sciences was higher than for the humanities. Low and medium correlations between Mendeley bookmarks and citation counts in all the investigated disciplines suggest that these measures reflect different aspects of research impact. Mendeley data were also used to discover patterns of information flow between scientific fields. Comparing information flows based on Mendeley bookmarking data and cross-disciplinary citation analysis for the disciplines revealed substantial similarities and some differences. Thus, the evidence from this study suggests that Mendeley readership data could be used to help capture knowledge transfer across scientific disciplines, especially for people that read but do not author articles, as well as giving impact evidence at an earlier stage than is possible with citation counts.
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paper_title: Groups in Academic Social Networking Services--An Exploration of Their Potential as a Platform for Multi-disciplinary Collaboration

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The importance of collaborations across geographical, institutional and/or disciplinary boundaries has been widely recognized in research communities, yet there exist a range of obstacles to such collaborations. This study is concerned with understanding the potential of academic social networking services (ASNS) as a medium or platform for cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary collaborations. Many ASNS sites allow scholars to form online groups as well as to build up their professional network individually. In this study, we look at the patterns of user participation in online groups in a ASNS site, Mendeley, with an emphasis on assessing the degree to which people from different disciplinary backgrounds gather in these groups. The results show that while there exists a need for better means to facilitate group formation and growth, the groups in Mendeley exhibit a great deal of diversity in their member composition in terms of disciplines. Overall, the findings of this study support the argument that online social networking, especially ASNS, may foster multi-disciplinary collaborations by providing a platform for researchers from diverse backgrounds to find one another and cooperate on issues of common interests.
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paper_title: Assessing the Impact of Publications Saved by Mendeley Users: Is There Any Different Pattern Among Users?

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The main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact of publications read (saved) by the different users in Mendeley in order to explore the extent to which their readership counts correlate with their citation indicators. The potential of filtering highly cited papers by Mendeley readerships and its different users have been also explored. For the analysis of the users, we have considered the information of the top three Mendeley ‘users’ reported by the Mendeley. Our results show that publications with Mendeley readerships tend to have higher citation and journal citation scores than publications without readerships. ‘Biomedical & health sciences’ and ‘Mathematics and computer science’ are the fields with respectively the most and the least readership activity in Mendeley. PhD students have the highest density of readerships per publication and Lecturers and Librarians have the lowest across all the different fields. Our precision-recall analysis indicates that in general, for publications with at least one reader in Mendeley, the capacity of readerships of filtering highly cited publications is better than (or at least as good as) Journal Citation Scores. We discuss the important limitation of Mendeley of only reporting the top three readers and not all of them in the potential development of indicators based on Mendeley and its users.
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paper_title: Network Structure of Social Coding in GitHub

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Social coding enables a different experience of software development as the activities and interests of one developer are easily advertised to other developers. Developers can thus track the activities relevant to various projects in one umbrella site. Such a major change in collaborative software development makes an investigation of networkings on social coding sites valuable. Furthermore, project hosting platforms promoting this development paradigm have been thriving, among which GitHub has arguably gained the most momentum. In this paper, we contribute to the body of knowledge on social coding by investigating the network structure of social coding in GitHub. We collect 100,000 projects and 30,000 developers from GitHub, construct developer-developer and project-project relationship graphs, and compute various characteristics of the graphs. We then identify influential developers and projects on this sub network of GitHub by using PageRank. Understanding how developers and projects are actually related to each other on a social coding site is the first step towards building tool supports to aid social programmers in performing their tasks more efficiently.
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paper_title: Social Networking Meets Software Development: Perspectives from GitHub, MSDN, Stack Exchange, and TopCoder

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Many successful software companies use social networking as a way to improve the services or products they provide. To gain an understanding of the role social networking plays in today's software development world, the guest editors of the January/February 2013 issue conducted semistructured interviews with leaders from four successful companies: Brian Doll, an engineer who manages GitHub's marketing; Doug Laundry, a principal group program manager at Microsoft; David Fullerton, vice president of engineering at Stack Exchange; and Robert Hughes, the president and chief operating officer of TopCoder. The first Web extra at http://try.github.com is a video of Joel Spolsky discussing the structure, software, technology, and culture of Stack Exchange. The second Web extra at http://blip.tv/play/gvUBgqLbRgI.html is a video of Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund demonstrating how Git not only incorporates the best features of existing source control systems but also includes unique distributed capabilities that make version control commands available without connectivity, allowing you to choose when to interact with a network. The third Web extra at http://blip.tv/play/gvUBgqLbRgI.html is a video of Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund demonstrating how to leverage Git's powerful yet underused advanced features. The last Web extra at http://youtu.be/SK6TBI1bNLI is a video of Thomas Baden, Chief Information Officer, State of Minnesota, Department of Human Services, describing the experience of working on the TopCoder Platform and with the members of the TopCoder Community.
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paper_title: Data Sharing by Scientists: Practices and Perceptions

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Background: Scientific research in the 21st century is more data intensive and collaborative than in the past. It is important to study the data practices of researchers – data accessibility, discovery, re-use, preservation and, particularly, data sharing. Data sharing is a valuable part of the scientific method allowing for verification of results and extending research from prior results. Methodology/Principal Findings: A total of 1329 scientists participated in this survey exploring current data sharing practices and perceptions of the barriers and enablers of data sharing. Scientists do not make their data electronically available to others for various reasons, including insufficient time and lack of funding. Most respondents are satisfied with their current processes for the initial and short-term parts of the data or research lifecycle (collecting their research data; searching for, describing or cataloging, analyzing, and short-term storage of their data) but are not satisfied with long-term data preservation. Many organizations do not provide support to their researchers for data management both in the shortand long-term. If certain conditions are met (such as formal citation and sharing reprints) respondents agree they are willing to share their data. There are also significant differences and approaches in data management practices based on primary funding agency, subject discipline, age, work focus, and world region. Conclusions/Significance: Barriers to effective data sharing and preservation are deeply rooted in the practices and culture of the research process as well as the researchers themselves. New mandates for data management plans from NSF and other federal agencies and world-wide attention to the need to share and preserve data could lead to changes. Large scale programs, such as the NSF-sponsored DataNET (including projects like DataONE) will both bring attention and resources to the issue and make it easier for scientists to apply sound data management principles.
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paper_title: Public sharing of research datasets: A pilot study of associations

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The public sharing of primary research datasets potentially benefits the research community but is not yet common practice. In this pilot study, we analyzed whether data sharing frequency was associated with funder and publisher requirements, journal impact factor, or investigator experience and impact. Across 397 recent biomedical microarray studies, we found investigators were more likely to publicly share their raw dataset when their study was published in a high-impact journal and when the first or last authors had high levels of career experience and impact. We estimate the USA's National Institutes of Health (NIH) data sharing policy applied to 19% of the studies in our cohort; being subject to the NIH data sharing plan requirement was not found to correlate with increased data sharing behavior in multivariate logistic regression analysis. Studies published in journals that required a database submission accession number as a condition of publication were more likely to share their data, but this trend was not statistically significant. These early results will inform our ongoing larger analysis, and hopefully contribute to the development of more effective data sharing initiatives.
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paper_title: Do highly cited researchers successfully use the social web?

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Academics can now use the web and the social websites to disseminate scholarly information in a variety of different ways. Although some scholars have taken advantage of these new online opportunities, it is not clear how widespread their uptake is or how much impact they can have. This study assesses the extent to which successful scientists have social web presences, focusing on one influential group: highly cited researchers working at European institutions. It also assesses the impact of these presences. We manually and systematically identified if the European highly cited researchers had profiles in Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Mendeley, Academia and LinkedIn or any content in SlideShare. We then used URL mentions and altmetric indicators to assess the impact of the web presences found. Although most of the scientists had an institutional website of some kind, few had created a profile in any social website investigated, and LinkedIn--the only non-academic site in the list--was the most popular. Scientists having one kind of social web profile were more likely to have another in many cases, especially in the life sciences and engineering. In most cases it was possible to estimate the relative impact of the profiles using a readily available statistic and there were disciplinary differences in the impact of the different kinds of profiles. Most social web profiles had some evidence of uptake, if not impact; nevertheless, the value of the indicators used is unclear.
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paper_title: How many citations are there in the Data Citation Index?

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19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), Leiden (The Netherlands) 3-5 september 2014.
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paper_title: Tracking citations and altmetrics for research data: Challenges and opportunities

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Editor's Summary ::: ::: ::: ::: Methods for determining research quality have long been debated but with little lasting agreement on standards, leading to the emergence of alternative metrics. Altmetrics are a useful supplement to traditional citation metrics, reflecting a variety of measurement points that give different perspectives on how a dataset is used and by whom. A positive development is the integration of a number of research datasets into the ISI Data Citation Index, making datasets searchable and linking them to published articles. Yet access to data resources and tracking the resulting altmetrics depend on specific qualities of the datasets and the systems where they are archived. Though research on altmetrics use is growing, the lack of standardization across datasets and system architecture undermines its generalizability. Without some standards, stakeholders' adoption of altmetrics will be limited.
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paper_title: Indicators for the Data Usage Index (DUI): an incentive for publishing primary biodiversity data through global information infrastructure

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BackgroundA professional recognition mechanism is required to encourage expedited publishing of an adequate volume of 'fit-for-use' biodiversity data. As a component of such a recognition mechanism, we propose the development of the Data Usage Index (DUI) to demonstrate to data publishers that their efforts of creating biodiversity datasets have impact by being accessed and used by a wide spectrum of user communities.DiscussionWe propose and give examples of a range of 14 absolute and normalized biodiversity dataset usage indicators for the development of a DUI based on search events and dataset download instances. The DUI is proposed to include relative as well as species profile weighted comparative indicators.ConclusionsWe believe that in addition to the recognition to the data publisher and all players involved in the data life cycle, a DUI will also provide much needed yet novel insight into how users use primary biodiversity data. A DUI consisting of a range of usage indicators obtained from the GBIF network and other relevant access points is within reach. The usage of biodiversity datasets leads to the development of a family of indicators in line with well known citation-based measurements of recognition.
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paper_title: Social media and scholarly reading

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how often university academic staff members use and create various forms of social media for their work and how that use influences their use of traditional scholarly information sources.Design/methodology/approach – This article is based on a 2011 academic reading study conducted at six higher learning institutions in the United Kingdom. Approximately 2,000 respondents completed the web‐based survey. The study used the critical incident of last reading by academics to gather information on the purpose, outcomes, and values of scholarly readings and access to library collections. In addition, academics were asked about their use and creation of social media as part of their work activities. The authors looked at six categories of social media – blogs, videos/YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, user comments in articles, podcasts, and other. This article focuses on the influence of social media on scholarly reading patterns.Findings – Most UK academics use o...
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paper_title: The role of online videos in research communication: A content analysis of YouTube videos cited in academic publications 1

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Although there is some evidence that online videos are increasingly used by academics for informal scholarly communication and teaching, the extent to which they are used in published academic research is unknown. This article explores the extent to which YouTube videos are cited in academic publications and whether there are significant broad disciplinary differences in this practice. To investigate, we extracted the URL citations to YouTube videos from academic publications indexed by Scopus. A total of 1,808 Scopus publications cited at least one YouTube video, and there was a steady upward growth in citing online videos within scholarly publications from 2006 to 2011, with YouTube citations being most common within arts and humanities (0.3%) and the social sciences (0.2%). A content analysis of 551 YouTube videos cited by research articles indicated that in science (78%) and in medicine and health sciences (77%), over three fourths of the cited videos had either direct scientific (e.g., laboratory experiments) or scientific-related contents (e.g., academic lectures or education) whereas in the arts and humanities, about 80% of the YouTube videos had art, culture, or history themes, and in the social sciences, about 63% of the videos were related to news, politics, advertisements, and documentaries. This shows both the disciplinary differences and the wide variety of innovative research communication uses found for videos within the different subject areas. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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paper_title: A Community of Curious Souls: An Analysis of Commenting Behavior on TED Talks Videos

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The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks website hosts video recordings of various experts, celebrities, academics, and others who discuss their topics of expertise. Funded by advertising and members but provided free online, TED Talks have been viewed over a billion times and are a science communication phenomenon. Although the organization has been derided for its populist slant and emphasis on entertainment value, no previous research has assessed audience reactions in order to determine the degree to which presenter characteristics and platform affect the reception of a video. This article addresses this issue via a content analysis of comments left on both the TED website and the YouTube platform (on which TED Talks videos are also posted). It was found that commenters were more likely to discuss the characteristics of a presenter on YouTube, whereas commenters tended to engage with the talk content on the TED website. In addition, people tended to be more emotional when the speaker was a woman (by leaving comments that were either positive or negative). The results can inform future efforts to popularize science amongst the public, as well as to provide insights for those looking to disseminate information via Internet videos.
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paper_title: The State of Blogging

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A semiconductor device comprising a surface layer of one conductivity type provided on a support and separated therefrom by a junction, said surface layer defining a surface and comprising island-insulating means in the form of an electrode pattern at the surface and which surrounds at least an island-shaped part of the surface layer comprising a component. The electrode pattern is separated from the surface layer by a barrier junction and is to induce electric fields in the surface layer to form a depletion region that is below the electrode pattern and extends throughout the thickness of the surface layer, an electric connection for draining leakage currents, is at part of the surface layer present at the edge of the surface and outside the pattern.
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paper_title: Using altmetrics for assessing research impact in the humanities

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The prospects of altmetrics are especially encouraging for research fields in the humanities that currently are difficult to study using established bibliometric methods. Yet, little is known about the altmetric impact of research fields in the humanities. Consequently, this paper analyses the altmetric coverage and impact of humanities-oriented articles and books published by Swedish universities during 2012. Some of the most common altmetric sources are examined using a sample of 310 journal articles and 54 books. Mendeley has the highest coverage of journal articles (61 %) followed by Twitter (21 %) while very few of the publications are mentioned in blogs or on Facebook. Books, on the other hand, are quite often tweeted while both Mendeley's and the novel data source Library Thing's coverage is low. Many of the problems of applying bibliometrics to the humanities are also relevant for altmetric approaches; the importance of non-journal publications, the reliance on print as well the limited coverage of non-English language publications. However, the continuing development and diversification of methods suggests that altmetrics could evolve into a valuable tool for assessing research in the humanities.
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paper_title: Studying Scientific Discourse on the Web Using Bibliometrics : A Chemistry Blogging Case Study

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In this work we study scientific discourse on the Web through its connection to the academic literature.
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paper_title: How is research blogged? A content analysis approach

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Blogs that cite academic articles have emerged as a potential source of alternative impact metrics for the visibility of the blogged articles. Nevertheless, to evaluate more fully the value of blog citations, it is necessary to investigate whether research blogs focus on particular types of articles or give new perspectives on scientific discourse. Therefore, we studied the characteristics of peer-reviewed references in blogs and the typical content of blog posts to gain insight into bloggers' motivations. The sample consisted of 391 blog posts from 2010 to 2012 in Researchblogging.org's health category. The bloggers mostly cited recent research articles or reviews from top multidisciplinary and general medical journals. Using content analysis methods, we created a general classification scheme for blog post content with 10 major topic categories, each with several subcategories. The results suggest that health research bloggers rarely self-cite and that the vast majority of their blog posts (90%) include a general discussion of the issue covered in the article, with more than one quarter providing health-related advice based on the article(s) covered. These factors suggest a genuine attempt to engage with a wider, nonacademic audience. Nevertheless, almost 30% of the posts included some criticism of the issues being discussed.
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paper_title: Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0

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Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process. It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications. Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.
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paper_title: Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities

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Digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) are novelty tools that can be used to facilitate broader involvement of citizens in the discussions about science. The same tools can be used to reinforce the traditional top-down model of science communication. Empirical investigations of particular technologies can help to understand how these tools are used in the dissemination of information and knowledge as well as stimulate a dialog about better models and practices of science communication. This study focuses on one of the ICTs that have already been adopted in science communication, on science blogging. The findings from the analysis of eleven blogs are presented in an attempt to understand current practices of science blogging and to provide insight into the role of blogging in the promotion of more interactive forms of science communication.
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paper_title: Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

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In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics", sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. ::: We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone. There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact "flavors", capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.
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paper_title: Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool

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Once upon a time, weblogs were automatically collated overviews of data about visitors to a web server. That's changed. Nowadays the texts called weblogs are definitely not written by a computer. Weblogs today are subjective annotations to the web rather than statistics about it. Weblogs, or blogs as they are affectionately termed, are frequently updated websites, usually personal, with commentary and links. Link lists are as old as home pages, but a blog is far from a static link list or home page. A blog consists of many relatively short posts, usually time-stamped, and organised in reverse chronology so that a reader will always see the most recent post first. The first weblogs were seen as filters to the Internet; interesting links to sites the reader might not have seen, often with commentary from the blogger. Though weblogs have many different themes, looks and writing styles, formally the genre is clear. Brief, dated posts collected on one web page are the main formal criteria. Evan Williams, one of the creators of the popular blogging tool Blogger, is succinct in his definition:
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paper_title: Social Media Release Increases Dissemination of Original Articles in the Clinical Pain Sciences

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A barrier to dissemination of research is that it depends on the end-user searching for or ‘pulling’ relevant knowledge from the literature base. Social media instead ‘pushes’ relevant knowledge straight to the end-user, via blogs and sites such as Facebook and Twitter. That social media is very effective at improving dissemination seems well accepted, but, remarkably, there is no evidence to support this claim. We aimed to quantify the impact of social media release on views and downloads of articles in the clinical pain sciences. Sixteen PLOS ONE articles were blogged and released via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and ResearchBlogging.org on one of two randomly selected dates. The other date served as a control. The primary outcomes were the rate of HTML views and PDF downloads of the article, over a seven-day period. The critical result was an increase in both outcome variables in the week after the blog post and social media release. The mean ± SD rate of HTML views in the week after the social media release was 18±18 per day, whereas the rate during the other three weeks was no more than 6±3 per day. The mean ± SD rate of PDF downloads in the week after the social media release was 4±4 per day, whereas the rate during the other three weeks was less than 1±1 per day (p 0.3 for all). We conclude that social media release of a research article in the clinical pain sciences increases the number of people who view or download that article, but conventional social media metrics are unrelated to the effect.
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paper_title: We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People

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"We the Media, has become something of a bible for those who believe the online medium will change journalism for the better." - "Financial Times". Big Media has lost its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet. Now that it's possible to publish in real time to a worldwide audience, a new breed of grassroots journalists are taking the news into their own hands. Armed with laptops, cell phones, and digital cameras, these readers-turned-reporters are transforming the news from a lecture into a conversation. In "We the Media", nationally acclaimed newspaper columnist and blogger Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make - and consume - the news. Gillmor shows how anyone can produce the news, using personal blogs, Internet chat groups, email, and a host of other tools. He sends a wake-up call to newsmakers - politicians, business executives, celebrities - and the marketers and PR flacks who promote them. He explains how to successfully play by the rules of this new era and shift from "control" to "engagement." And, he makes a strong case to his fell journalists that, in the face of a plethora of Internet-fueled news vehicles, they must change or become irrelevant. Journalism in the 21st century will be fundamentally different from the Big Media oligarchy that prevails today. "We the Media" casts light on the future of journalism, and invites us all to be part of it. Dan Gillmor is founder of Grassroots Media Inc., a project aimed at enabling grassroots journalism and expanding its reach. The company's first launch is Bayosphere.com, a site "of, by, and for the San Francisco Bay Area." From 1994-2004, Gillmor was a columnist at the "San Jose Mercury News", Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the "Mercury News" after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the "Kansas City Times" and several newspapers in Vermont. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist, he played music professionally for seven years.
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paper_title: Blog-supported scientific communication: An exploratory analysis based on social hyperlinks in a Chinese blog community

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As a new-style computer-mediated communication system, the blog has been gaining popularity among various Web users. Blog communities come into being in the process of self-organized communication between bloggers and the community structures are reflected by the embedded social networks. This study research the communication patterns of scientist bloggers with the data from the largest Chinese-language scientific blog community specializing in computer and information sciences and technologies, i.e. the Csdn blog. The social network analysis of its blogroll link data suggests that the Csdn blog community is a small-world network. Many sub-communities exist in the blog community. The communication between the central and ordinary bloggers within the same sub-community is usually one-way and dense. The structure of the Csdn blog community indicates that distributed central actors are still important in the diffusion and communication of scientific knowledge.
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paper_title: Translating Research For Health Policy: Researchers’ Perceptions And Use Of Social Media

paper_content:

As the United States moves forward with health reform, the communication gap between researchers and policy makers will need to be narrowed to promote policies informed by evidence. Social media represent an expanding channel for communication. Academic journals, public health agencies, and health care organizations are increasingly using social media to communicate health information. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now regularly tweets to 290,000 followers. We conducted a survey of health policy researchers about using social media and two traditional channels (traditional media and direct outreach) to disseminate research findings to policy makers. Researchers rated the efficacy of the three dissemination methods similarly but rated social media lower than the other two in three domains: researchers’ confidence in their ability to use the method, peers’ respect for its use, and how it is perceived in academic promotion. Just 14 percent of our participants reported tweeting, ...
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paper_title: Science blogging: an exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions

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This paper presents results from three studies on science blogging, the use of blogs for science communication. A survey addresses the views and motives of science bloggers, a first content analysis examines material published in science blogging platforms, while a second content analysis looks at reader responses to controversial issues covered in science blogs. Bloggers determine to a considerable degree which communicative function their blog can realize and how accessible it will be to non-experts Frequently readers are interested in adding their views to a post, a form of involvement which is in turn welcomed by the majority of bloggers.
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paper_title: Studying Scientific Discourse on the Web Using Bibliometrics : A Chemistry Blogging Case Study

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In this work we study scientific discourse on the Web through its connection to the academic literature.
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paper_title: Academic blogging, academic practice and academic identity

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This paper describes a small-scale study which investigates the role of blogging in professional academic practice in higher education. It draws on interviews with a sample of academics (scholars, researchers and teachers) who have blogs and on the author's own reflections on blogging to investigate the function of blogging in academic practice and its contribution to academic identity. It argues that blogging offers the potential of a new genre of accessible academic production which could contribute to the creation of a new twenty-first century academic identity with more involvement as a public intellectual.
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paper_title: Blogging and the Transformation of Legal Scholarship

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Does blogging have anything to do with legal scholarship? Could blogging transform the legal academy? This paper suggests that these are the wrong questions. Blogs have plenty to do with legal scholarship - that's obvious. But what blogs have to do with legal scholarship isn't driven by anything special about blogs qua weblogs, qua collections of web pages that share the form of a journal or log. The relationship between blogging and the future of legal scholarship is a product of other forces - the emergence of the short form, the obsolesce of exclusive rights, and the trend towards the disintermediation of legal scholarship. Those forces and their relationship to blogging will be the primary focus of this paper. The transition from the "long form" to the "short form" involves movement from very long law review articles and multivolume treatises to new forms of legal scholarship, including the blog post, the idea piece, and the use of collaborative online authoring environments such as wikis. The transition from exclusive rights to open source requires publication in formats that provide full text searchability and the use of copyright to insure that scholarship can be freely downloaded and duplicated. The trend toward disintermediation reflects the diminished role of traditional intermediaries such as student and peer editorial boards and the growing role of search engines such as Google. These trends are the result of technology change and the fundamental forces that drive legal scholarship. Each of the three trends, the short form, open access, and disintermediation reduces search costs and access costs to legal scholarship. Reducing costs has other important implications, including the facilitation of the globalization of legal scholarship and the reduction of lag times between the production and full-scale dissemination of new scholarship. Each of these important trends is facilitated by blogs and blogging, but the blog or weblog is only one form that these trends can take. Blogs express and facilitate the fundamental forces that are already transforming legal scholarship in fundamental ways.
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paper_title: Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges

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Academics are increasingly being urged to blog in order to expand their audiences, create networks and to learn to write in more reader friendly style. This paper holds this advocacy up to empirical scrutiny. A content analysis of 100 academic blogs suggests that academics most commonly write about academic work conditions and policy contexts, share information and provide advice; the intended audience for this work is other higher education staff. We contend that academic blogging may constitute a community of practice in which a hybrid public/private academic operates in a ‘gift economy’. We note however that academic blogging is increasingly of interest to institutions and this may challenge some of the current practices we have recorded. We conclude that there is still much to learn about academic blogging practices.
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paper_title: The roles, reasons and restrictions of science blogs.

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Over the past few years, blogging ('web logging') has become a major social movement, and as such includes blogs by scientists about science. Blogs are highly idiosyncratic, personal and ephemeral means of public expression, and yet they contribute to the current practice and reputation of science as much as, if not more than, any popular scientific work or visual presentation. It is important, therefore, to understand this phenomenon.
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paper_title: How is research blogged? A content analysis approach

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Blogs that cite academic articles have emerged as a potential source of alternative impact metrics for the visibility of the blogged articles. Nevertheless, to evaluate more fully the value of blog citations, it is necessary to investigate whether research blogs focus on particular types of articles or give new perspectives on scientific discourse. Therefore, we studied the characteristics of peer-reviewed references in blogs and the typical content of blog posts to gain insight into bloggers' motivations. The sample consisted of 391 blog posts from 2010 to 2012 in Researchblogging.org's health category. The bloggers mostly cited recent research articles or reviews from top multidisciplinary and general medical journals. Using content analysis methods, we created a general classification scheme for blog post content with 10 major topic categories, each with several subcategories. The results suggest that health research bloggers rarely self-cite and that the vast majority of their blog posts (90%) include a general discussion of the issue covered in the article, with more than one quarter providing health-related advice based on the article(s) covered. These factors suggest a genuine attempt to engage with a wider, nonacademic audience. Nevertheless, almost 30% of the posts included some criticism of the issues being discussed.
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paper_title: Bloggership, or is publishing a blog scholarship? A survey of academic librarians

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Purpose – The aim of this paper is to gauge how academic libraries treat publishing a blog.Design/methodology/approach – As blogging becomes more popular, the question arises as to whether it should count as scholarship or a creative activity in academic promotion and tenure. To find out, the author sent a link to a questionnaire to several e‐mail lists, inviting academic librarians to answer a short survey.Findings – In total, 73.9 percent of respondents indicated that their institution expects them to engage in scholarly activities and/or publish scholarly articles, 53.6 percent indicated that their performance review committees do not weigh a blog the same as an article published in a peer‐reviewed journal.Research limitations/implications – As technology changes, policies will need to change.Practical implications – Libraries may need to adapt to new forms of scholarship. Electronic scholarship needs a mechanism for peer‐review.Originality/value – The paper is original – the author did not find any ot...
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paper_title: Examining the Medical Blogosphere: An Online Survey of Medical Bloggers

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Background: Blogs are the major contributors to the large increase of new websites created each year. Most blogs allow readers to leave comments and, in this way, generate both conversation and encourage collaboration. Despite their popularity, however, little is known about blogs or their creators. ::: Objectives: To contribute to a better understanding of the medical blogosphere by investigating the characteristics of medical bloggers and their blogs, including bloggers’ Internet and blogging habits, their motivations for blogging, and whether or not they follow practices associated with journalism. ::: Methods: We approached 197 medical bloggers of English-language medical blogs which provided direct contact information, with posts published within the past month. The survey included 37 items designed to evaluate data about Internet and blogging habits, blog characteristics, blogging motivations, and, finally, the demographic data of bloggers. ::: Pearson’s Chi-Square test was used to assess the significance of an association between 2 categorical variables. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was utilized to reveal the relationship between participants’ ages, as well as the number of maintained blogs, and their motivation for blogging. The Mann-Whitney U test was employed to reveal relationships between practices associated with journalism and participants’ characteristics like gender and pseudonym use. ::: Results: A total of 80 (42%) of 197 eligible participants responded. The majority of responding bloggers were white (75%), highly educated (71% with a Masters degree or doctorate), male (59%), residents of the United States (72%), between the ages of 30 and 49 (58%), and working in the healthcare industry (67%). Most of them were experienced bloggers, with 23% (18/80) blogging for 4 or more years, 38% (30/80) for 2 or 3 years, 32% (26/80) for about a year, and only 7% (6/80) for 6 months or less. Those who received attention from the news media numbered 66% (53/80). When it comes to best practices associated with journalism, the participants most frequently reported including links to original source of material and spending extra time verifying facts, while rarely seeking permission to post copyrighted material. Bloggers who have published a scientific paper were more likely to quote other people or media than those who have never published such a paper (U= 506.5, n1= 41, n2= 35, P= .016). Those blogging under their real name more often included links to original sources than those writing under a pseudonym (U= 446.5, n1= 58, n2= 19, P= .01). Major motivations for blogging were sharing practical knowledge or skills with others, influencing the way others think, and expressing oneself creatively. ::: Conclusions: Medical bloggers are highly educated and devoted blog writers, faithful to their sources and readers. Sharing practical knowledge and skills, as well as influencing the way other people think, were major motivations for blogging among our medical bloggers. Medical blogs are frequently picked up by mainstream media; thus, blogs are an important vehicle to influence medical and health policy. [J Med Internet Res 2008;10(3):e28]
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paper_title: Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0

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Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process. It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications. Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.
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paper_title: How Digital Are the Digital Humanities? An Analysis of Two Scholarly Blogging Platforms

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In this paper we compare two academic networking platforms, HASTAC and Hypotheses, to show the distinct ways in which they serve specific communities in the Digital Humanities (DH) in different national and disciplinary contexts. After providing background information on both platforms, we apply co-word analysis and topic modeling to show thematic similarities and differences between the two sites, focusing particularly on how they frame DH as a new paradigm in humanities research. We encounter a much higher ratio of posts using humanities-related terms compared to their digital counterparts, suggesting a one-way dependency of digital humanities-related terms on the corresponding unprefixed labels. The results also show that the terms digital archive, digital literacy, and digital pedagogy are relatively independent from the respective unprefixed terms, and that digital publishing, digital libraries, and digital media show considerable cross-pollination between the specialization and the general noun. The topic modeling reproduces these findings and reveals further differences between the two platforms. Our findings also indicate local differences in how the emerging field of DH is conceptualized and show dynamic topical shifts inside these respective contexts.
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paper_title: Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities

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Digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) are novelty tools that can be used to facilitate broader involvement of citizens in the discussions about science. The same tools can be used to reinforce the traditional top-down model of science communication. Empirical investigations of particular technologies can help to understand how these tools are used in the dissemination of information and knowledge as well as stimulate a dialog about better models and practices of science communication. This study focuses on one of the ICTs that have already been adopted in science communication, on science blogging. The findings from the analysis of eleven blogs are presented in an attempt to understand current practices of science blogging and to provide insight into the role of blogging in the promotion of more interactive forms of science communication.
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paper_title: Science Blogging: Networks, Boundaries and Limitations

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ABSTRACTThere is limited research into the realities of science blogging, how science bloggers themselves view their activity and what bloggers can achieve. The ‘badscience’ blogs analysed here show a number of interesting developments, with significant implications for understandings of science blogging and scientific cultures more broadly. A functioning and diverse online community (with offline elements) has been constructed, with a number of non-professional and anonymous members and with boundary work being used to establish a recognisable outgroup. The community has developed distinct norms alongside a type of distributed authority and has negotiated the authority, anonymity and varying status of many community members in some interesting and novel ways. Activist norms and initiatives have been actioned, with some prominent community campaigns and action. There are questions about what science blogging—both in the UK and internationally—may be able to achieve in future and about the fragility of the...
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paper_title: Wired Academia: Why Social Science Scholars Are Using Social Media

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Social media websites are having a significant impact on how collaborative relationships are formed and information is disseminated throughout society. While there is a large body of literature devoted to the ways in which the general public is making use of social media, there is little research regarding how such trends are impacting scholarly practices. This paper presents the results of a study on how academics, primarily in social sciences, are adopting these new sites.
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paper_title: Beyond the Blog

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This dissertation examines weblog community as a materially afforded and socially constructed space. In a set of three case studies, this dissertation examines three separate weblog communities bet ...
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paper_title: Scholarly hyperwriting: The function of links in academic weblogs

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Weblogs are gaining momentum as one of most versatile tools for online scholarly communication. Since academic weblogs tend to be used by scholars to position themselves in a disciplinary blogging community, links are essential to their construction. The aim of this article is to analyze the reasons for linking in academic weblogs and to determine how links are used for distribution of information, collaborative construction of knowledge, and construction of the blog's and the blogger's identity. For this purpose I analyzed types of links in 15 academic blogs, considering both sidebar links and in-post links. The results show that links are strategically used by academic bloggers for several purposes, among others to seek their place in a disciplinary community, to engage in hypertext conversations for collaborative construction of knowledge, to organize information in the blog, to publicize their research, to enhance the blog's visibility, and to optimize blog entries and the blog itself. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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paper_title: The Blogosphere in the Spanish Literary Field. Consequences and Challenges to Twenty-First Century Literature

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This paper analyses the impact of blogs on the Hispanic literary field, and how the spreading of blogs concerned with literary critics and poetry is questioning traditional hierarchies. It looks at how literary reviews and critics on the Internet are superseding traditional criticism, which has been accused of an excessive interdependence between publishers, newspapers, poets, and critics. It will be argued that, in this competition between paper and Internet media, the former often functions as a conservative academic bastion whose prestige is being constantly contested. In addition, attention will be paid to websites like Las afinidades electivas, defined as ‘an attempt for virtual interconnection between contemporary Spanish poets’, social networks which recently have influenced other collective initiatives. In all these cases, the focus will be on the formal and thematic challenges which this new medium of diffusion offers for the development of a new literature.
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paper_title: Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information

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The research blog has become a popular mechanism for the quick discussion of scholarly information. However, unlike peer-reviewed journals, the characteristics of this form of scientific discourse are not well understood, for example in terms of the spread of blogger levels of education, gender and institutional affiliations. In this paper we fill this gap by analyzing a sample of blog posts discussing science via an aggregator called ResearchBlogging.org (RB). ResearchBlogging.org aggregates posts based on peer-reviewed research and allows bloggers to cite their sources in a scholarly manner. We studied the bloggers, blog posts and referenced journals of bloggers who posted at least 20 items. We found that RB bloggers show a preference for papers from high-impact journals and blog mostly about research in the life and behavioral sciences. The most frequently referenced journal sources in the sample were: Science, Nature, PNAS and PLoS One. Most of the bloggers in our sample had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs, and at least 90% of these accounts connect to at least one other RB-related Twitter account. The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.
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paper_title: Science blogs as boundary layers: Creating and understanding new writer and reader interactions through science blogging

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This study examines the affordances that journalistic science blogging offers at the boundaries between science communicators, researchers, non-scientists, and other readers. Taking a framework of boundary phenomena, it examines, as a case study, the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science and in particular two posts that spawned a collaboration between a scientist and a farmer. Two existing boundary phenomena, boundary objects and boundary organizations, are examined as possible models for understanding the interactions facilitated by this science blog. These existing phenomena are argued to not adequately account for and describe the interactions between people and information facilitated by the case study posts. To better understand science blogging boundaries, a new category of boundary phenomenon – the boundary layer – is proposed.
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paper_title: Blogs and the Promotion and Tenure Letter

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Should blogs count as legal scholarship for purposes of tenure? This essay looks at the line between legal scholarship and service. It considers the value of blogging and the role it should play in a person's tenure review.
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paper_title: I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context

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The number of scholarly blogs on the Web is increasing. In this article, a group of researchers are asked to describe the functions that their blogs serve for them as researchers. The results show that their blogging is motivated by the possibility to share knowledge, that the blog aids creativity, and that it provides a feeling of being connected in their work as researchers. The blog serves in particular as a creative catalyst in the work of researchers, where writing forms a large part, which is not as prominent as a motivation in other professional blogs. In addition, the analysis brings out the blogs' combination of functions and the possibility it offers to reach multiple audiences as a motivating factor that makes the blog different from other kinds of communication in scholarly contexts.
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paper_title: Translating Research For Health Policy: Researchers’ Perceptions And Use Of Social Media

paper_content:

As the United States moves forward with health reform, the communication gap between researchers and policy makers will need to be narrowed to promote policies informed by evidence. Social media represent an expanding channel for communication. Academic journals, public health agencies, and health care organizations are increasingly using social media to communicate health information. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now regularly tweets to 290,000 followers. We conducted a survey of health policy researchers about using social media and two traditional channels (traditional media and direct outreach) to disseminate research findings to policy makers. Researchers rated the efficacy of the three dissemination methods similarly but rated social media lower than the other two in three domains: researchers’ confidence in their ability to use the method, peers’ respect for its use, and how it is perceived in academic promotion. Just 14 percent of our participants reported tweeting, ...
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paper_title: Using altmetrics for assessing research impact in the humanities

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The prospects of altmetrics are especially encouraging for research fields in the humanities that currently are difficult to study using established bibliometric methods. Yet, little is known about the altmetric impact of research fields in the humanities. Consequently, this paper analyses the altmetric coverage and impact of humanities-oriented articles and books published by Swedish universities during 2012. Some of the most common altmetric sources are examined using a sample of 310 journal articles and 54 books. Mendeley has the highest coverage of journal articles (61 %) followed by Twitter (21 %) while very few of the publications are mentioned in blogs or on Facebook. Books, on the other hand, are quite often tweeted while both Mendeley's and the novel data source Library Thing's coverage is low. Many of the problems of applying bibliometrics to the humanities are also relevant for altmetric approaches; the importance of non-journal publications, the reliance on print as well the limited coverage of non-English language publications. However, the continuing development and diversification of methods suggests that altmetrics could evolve into a valuable tool for assessing research in the humanities.
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paper_title: Tweeting Links to Academic Articles

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Academic articles are now frequently tweeted and so Twitter seems to be a useful tool for scholars to use to help keep up with publications and discussions in their fields. Perhaps as a result of this, tweet counts are increasingly used by digital libraries and journal websites as indicators of an article's interest or impact. Nevertheless, it is not known whether tweets are typically positive, neutral or critical, or how articles are normally tweeted. These are problems for those wishing to tweet articles effectively and for those wishing to know whether tweet counts in digital libraries should be taken seriously. In response, a pilot study content analysis was conducted of 270 tweets linking to articles in four journals, four digital libraries and two DOI URLs, collected over a period of eight months in 2012. The vast majority of the tweets echoed an article title (42%) or a brief summary (41%). One reason for summarising an article seemed to be to translate it for a general audience. Few tweets explicitly praised an article and none were critical. Most tweets did not directly refer to the article author, but some did and others were clearly self-citations. In summary, tweets containing links to scholarly articles generally provide little more than publicity, and so whilst tweet counts may provide evidence of the popularity of an article, the contents of the tweets themselves are unlikely to give deep insights into scientists' reactions to publications, except perhaps in special cases.
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paper_title: Presenting professorship on social media: from content and strategy to evaluation

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Technology has helped to reform class dynamics and teacher-student relationships. Although the phenomenon of online presentation has drawn considerable scholarly attention, academics seem to have an incomplete understanding about their own presentations online, especially in using social media. Without a thorough examination of how academics present themselves on social media, our understanding of the online learning environment is limited. To fill this void, this study aims to explore the following: (1) the content that college professors provide and the strategy they employ to present it on social media; and (2) how the public evaluates professors based on the content and strategy presented on social media. This study utilizes two methods. First, it conducts a content analysis of 2,783 pieces of microblog posts from 142 full-time communication professors' microblog accounts. Second, it conducts an online experiment based on a between-subject factorial design of 2 (gender: male vs. female) X 3 (topic: pe...
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paper_title: Social media and scholarly reading

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how often university academic staff members use and create various forms of social media for their work and how that use influences their use of traditional scholarly information sources.Design/methodology/approach – This article is based on a 2011 academic reading study conducted at six higher learning institutions in the United Kingdom. Approximately 2,000 respondents completed the web‐based survey. The study used the critical incident of last reading by academics to gather information on the purpose, outcomes, and values of scholarly readings and access to library collections. In addition, academics were asked about their use and creation of social media as part of their work activities. The authors looked at six categories of social media – blogs, videos/YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, user comments in articles, podcasts, and other. This article focuses on the influence of social media on scholarly reading patterns.Findings – Most UK academics use o...
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paper_title: Adapting sentiment analysis for tweets linking to scientific papers

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Introduction In the context of “altmetrics”, tweets have been discussed as potential indicators of immediate and broader societal impact of scientific documents (Thelwall et al., 2013a). However, it is not yet clear to what extent Twitter captures actual research impact. A small case study (Thelwall et al., 2013b) suggests that tweets to journal articles neither comment on nor express any sentiments towards the publication, which suggests that tweets merely disseminate bibliographic information, often even automatically (Haustein et al., in press). This study analyses the sentiments of tweets for a large representative set of scientific papers by specifically adapting different methods to academic articles distributed on Twitter. The aim is to improve the understanding of Twitter’s role in scholarly communication and the meaning of tweets as impact metrics.
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paper_title: Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact

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Background: Citations in peer-reviewed articles and the impact factor are generally accepted measures of scientific impact. Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, blogs or social bookmarking tools provide the possibility to construct innovative article-level or journal-level metrics to gauge impact and influence. However, the relationship of the these new metrics to traditional metrics such as citations is not known. Objective: (1) To explore the feasibility of measuring social impact of and public attention to scholarly articles by analyzing buzz in social media, (2) to explore the dynamics, content, and timing of tweets relative to the publication of a scholarly article, and (3) to explore whether these metrics are sensitive and specific enough to predict highly cited articles. Methods: Between July 2008 and November 2011, all tweets containing links to articles in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) were mined. For a subset of 1573 tweets about 55 articles published between issues 3/2009 and 2/2010, different metrics of social media impact were calculated and compared against subsequent citation data from Scopus and Google Scholar 17 to 29 months later. A heuristic to predict the top-cited articles in each issue through tweet metrics was validated. Results: A total of 4208 tweets cited 286 distinct JMIR articles. The distribution of tweets over the first 30 days after article publication followed a power law (Zipf, Bradford, or Pareto distribution), with most tweets sent on the day when an article was published (1458/3318, 43.94% of all tweets in a 60-day period) or on the following day (528/3318, 15.9%), followed by a rapid decay. The Pearson correlations between tweetations and citations were moderate and statistically significant, with correlation coefficients ranging from .42 to .72 for the log-transformed Google Scholar citations, but were less clear for Scopus citations and rank correlations. A linear multivariate model with time and tweets as significant predictors (P < .001) could explain 27% of the variation of citations. Highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles (9/12 or 75% of highly tweeted article were highly cited, while only 3/43 or 7% of less-tweeted articles were highly cited; rate ratio 0.75/0.07 = 10.75, 95% confidence interval, 3.4–33.6). Top-cited articles can be predicted from top-tweeted articles with 93% specificity and 75% sensitivity. Conclusions: Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time. [J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e123]
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paper_title: International Urology Journal Club via Twitter: 12-Month Experience

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Abstract Background Online journal clubs have increasingly been utilised to overcome the limitations of the traditional journal club. However, to date, no reported online journal club is available for international participation. Objective To present a 12-mo experience from the International Urology Journal Club, the world's first international journal club using Twitter, an online micro-blogging platform, and to demonstrate the viability and sustainability of such a journal club. Design, setting, and participants #urojc is an asynchronous 48-h monthly journal club moderated by the Twitter account @iurojc. The open invitation discussions focussed on papers typically published within the previous 2–4 wk. Data were obtained via third-party Twitter analysis services. Outcome measurements and statistical analysis Outcomes analysed included number of total and new users, number of tweets, and qualitative analysis of the relevance of tweets. Analysis was undertaken using GraphPad software, Microsoft Excel, and thematic qualitative analysis. Results and limitations The first 12 mo saw a total of 189 unique users representing 19 countries and 6 continents. There was a mean of 39 monthly participants that included 14 first-time participants per month. The mean number of tweets per month was 195 of which 62% represented original tweets directly related to the topic of discussion and 22% represented retweets of original posts. A mean of 130 832 impressions, or reach , were created per month. The @iurojc moderator account has accumulated >1000 followers. The study is limited by potentially incomplete data extracted by third-party Twitter analysers. Conclusions Social media provides a potential for enormous international communication that has not been possible in the past. We believe the pioneering #urojc is both viable and sustainable. There is unlimited scope for journal clubs in other fields to follow the example of #urojc and utilise online portals to revitalise the traditional journal club while fostering international relationships.
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paper_title: Increased Use of Twitter at a Medical Conference: A Report and a Review of the Educational Opportunities

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BACKGROUND ::: Most consider Twitter as a tool purely for social networking. However, it has been used extensively as a tool for online discussion at nonmedical and medical conferences, and the academic benefits of this tool have been reported. Most anesthetists still have yet to adopt this new educational tool. There is only one previously published report of the use of Twitter by anesthetists at an anesthetic conference. This paper extends that work. ::: ::: ::: OBJECTIVE ::: We report the uptake and growth in the use of Twitter, a microblogging tool, at an anesthetic conference and review the potential use of Twitter as an educational tool for anesthetists. ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: A unique Twitter hashtag (#WSM12) was created and promoted by the organizers of the Winter Scientific Meeting held by The Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI) in London in January 2012. Twitter activity was compared with Twitter activity previously reported for the AAGBI Annual Conference (September 2011 in Edinburgh). All tweets posted were categorized according to the person making the tweet and the purpose for which they were being used. The categories were determined from a literature review. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: A total of 227 tweets were posted under the #WSM12 hashtag representing a 530% increase over the previously reported anesthetic conference. Sixteen people joined the Twitter stream by using this hashtag (300% increase). Excellent agreement (κ = 0.924) was seen in the classification of tweets across the 11 categories. Delegates primarily tweeted to create and disseminate notes and learning points (55%), describe which session was attended, undertake discussions, encourage speakers, and for social reasons. In addition, the conference organizers, trade exhibitors, speakers, and anesthetists who did not attend the conference all contributed to the Twitter stream. The combined total number of followers of those who actively tweeted represented a potential audience of 3603 people. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: This report demonstrates an increase in uptake and growth in the use of Twitter at an anesthetic conference and the review illustrates the opportunities and benefits for medical education in the future.
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paper_title: Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication

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This paper investigates disciplinary differences in how researchers use the microblogging site Twitter. Tweets from selected researchers in ten disciplines (astrophysics, biochemistry, digital humanities, economics, history of science, cheminformatics, cognitive science, drug discovery, social network analysis, and sociology) were collected and analyzed both statistically and qualitatively. The researchers tended to share more links and retweet more than the average Twitter users in earlier research and there were clear disciplinary differences in how they used Twitter. Biochemists retweeted substantially more than researchers in the other disciplines. Researchers in digital humanities and cognitive science used Twitter more for conversations, while researchers in economics shared the most links. Finally, whilst researchers in biochemistry, astrophysics, cheminformatics and digital humanities seemed to use Twitter for scholarly communication, scientific use of Twitter in economics, sociology and history of science appeared to be marginal.
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paper_title: Tweeting biomedicine: an analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature

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Data collected by social media platforms have been introduced as new sources for indicators to help measure the impact of scholarly research in ways that are complementary to traditional citation analysis. Data generated from social media activities can be used to reflect broad types of impact. This article aims to provide systematic evidence about how often Twitter is used to disseminate information about journal articles in the biomedical sciences. The analysis is based on 1.4 million documents covered by both PubMed and Web of Science and published between 2010 and 2012. The number of tweets containing links to these documents was analyzed and compared to citations to evaluate the degree to which certain journals, disciplines, and specialties were represented on Twitter and how far tweets correlate with citation impact. With less than 10% of PubMed articles mentioned on Twitter, its uptake is low in general but differs between journals and specialties. Correlations between tweets and citations are low, implying that impact metrics based on tweets are different from those based on citations. A framework using the coverage of articles and the correlation between Twitter mentions and citations is proposed to facilitate the evaluation of novel social-media-based metrics.
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paper_title: Social media in radiology: early trends in Twitter microblogging at radiology's largest international meeting.

paper_content:

PURPOSE ::: Twitter is a social media microblogging platform that allows rapid exchange of information between individuals. Despite its widespread acceptance and use at various other medical specialty meetings, there are no published data evaluating its use at radiology meetings. The purpose of this study is to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the use of Twitter as a microblogging platform at recent RSNA annual meetings. ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: Twitter activity meta-data tagged with official meeting hashtags #RSNA11 and #RSNA12 were collected and analyzed. Multiple metrics were evaluated, including daily and hourly Twitter activity, frequency of microblogging activity over time, characteristics of the 100 most active Twitter users at each meeting, characteristics of meeting-related tweets, and the geographic origin of meeting microbloggers. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: The use of Twitter microblogging increased by at least 30% by all identifiable meaningful metrics between the 2011 and 2012 RSNA annual meetings, including total tweets, tweets per day, activity of the most active microbloggers, and total number of microbloggers. Similar increases were observed in numbers of North American and international microbloggers. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSION ::: Markedly increased use of the Twitter microblogging platform at recent RSNA annual meetings demonstrates the potential to leverage this technology to engage meeting attendees, improve scientific sessions, and promote improved collaboration at national radiology meetings.
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paper_title: Identifying and analyzing researchers on twitter

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For millions of users Twitter is an important communication platform, a social network, and a system for resource sharing. Likewise, scientists use Twitter to connect with other researchers, announce calls for papers, or share their thoughts. Filtering tweets, discovering other researchers, or finding relevant information on a topic of interest, however, is difficult since no directory of researchers on Twitter exists. In this paper we present an approach to identify Twitter accounts of researchers and demonstrate its utility for the discipline of computer science. Based on a seed set of computer science conferences we collect relevant Twitter users which we can partially map to ground-truth data. The mapping is leveraged to learn a model for classifying the remaining. To gain first insights into how researchers use Twitter, we empirically analyze the identified users and compare their age, popularity, influence, and social network.
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paper_title: Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications

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Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications. We report findings from a study of the use of Web 2.0 services by UK researchers and their use in novel forms of scholarly communication. We document the contours of adoption, the barriers and enablers, and the dynamics of innovation in Web services and scholarly practices. We conclude by considering the steps that different stakeholders might take to encourage greater experimentation and uptake.
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paper_title: Astrophysicists on Twitter: An in-depth analysis of tweeting and scientific publication behavior

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Purpose ::: ::: ::: ::: – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the tweeting behavior of 37 astrophysicists on Twitter and compares their tweeting behavior with their publication behavior and citation impact to show whether they tweet research-related topics or not. ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: Design/methodology/approach ::: ::: ::: ::: – Astrophysicists on Twitter are selected to compare their tweets with their publications from Web of Science. Different user groups are identified based on tweeting and publication frequency. ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: Findings ::: ::: ::: ::: – A moderate negative correlation (ρ=−0.339) is found between the number of publications and tweets per day, while retweet and citation rates do not correlate. The similarity between tweets and abstracts is very low (cos=0.081). User groups show different tweeting behavior such as retweeting and including hashtags, usernames and URLs. ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: Research limitations/implications ::: ::: ::: ::: – The study is limited in terms of the small set of astrophysicists. Results are not necessarily representative of the entire astrophysicist community on Twitter and they most certainly do not apply to scientists in general. Future research should apply the methods to a larger set of researchers and other scientific disciplines. ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: Practical implications ::: ::: ::: ::: – To a certain extent, this study helps to understand how researchers use Twitter. The results hint at the fact that impact on Twitter can neither be equated with nor replace traditional research impact metrics. However, tweets and other so-called altmetrics might be able to reflect other impact of scientists such as public outreach and science communication. ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: Originality/value ::: ::: ::: ::: – To the best of the knowledge, this is the first in-depth study comparing researchers’ tweeting activity and behavior with scientific publication output in terms of quantity, content and impact.
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paper_title: A Case Study in Serendipity: Environmental Researchers Use of Traditional and Social Media for Dissemination

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In the face of demands for researchers to engage more actively with a wider range of publics and to capture different kinds of research impacts and engagements, we explored the ways a small number of environmental researchers use traditional and social media to disseminate research. A questionnaire was developed to investigate the impact of different media as a tool to broker contact between researchers and a variety of different stakeholders (for example, publics, other researchers, policymakers, journalists) as well as how researchers perceive that their use of these media has changed over the past five years. The questionnaire was sent to 504 researchers whose work had featured in a policy-oriented e-news service. 149 valid responses were received (29%). Coverage in traditional media (newspapers, broadcast) not only brokers contact with other journalists, but is a good source of contact from other researchers (n=47, 62%) and members of the public (n=36, 26%). Although the use of social media was limited amongst our sample, it did broker contact with other researchers (n=17, 47%) and the public (n=10, 28%). Nevertheless, few environmental researchers were actively using social media to disseminate their research findings, with many continuing to rely on academic journals and face-to-face communication to reach both academic and public audiences.
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paper_title: How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations

paper_content:

We analyze the online response to the preprint publication of a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and May 2011. We study three forms of responses to these preprints: downloads on the arXiv.org site, mentions on the social media site Twitter, and early citations in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether one precedes or follows the other. Second, we run regression and correlation tests to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions, arXiv downloads, and article citations. We find that Twitter mentions and arXiv downloads of scholarly articles follow two distinct temporal patterns of activity, with Twitter mentions having shorter delays and narrower time spans than arXiv downloads. We also find that the volume of Twitter mentions is statistically correlated with arXiv downloads and early citations just months after the publication of a preprint, with a possible bias that favors highly mentioned articles.
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paper_title: Geographic variation in social media metrics: an analysis of Latin American journal articles

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Purpose – The purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how the potential of altmetrics varies around the world by measuring the percentage of articles with non-zero metrics (coverage) for articles published from a developing region (Latin America). Design/methodology/approach – This study uses article metadata from a prominent Latin American journal portal, SciELO, and combines it with altmetrics data from Altmetric.com and with data collected by author-written scripts. The study is primarily descriptive, focusing on coverage levels disaggregated by year, country, subject area, and language. Findings – Coverage levels for most of the social media sources studied was zero or negligible. Only three metrics had coverage levels above 2 per cent – Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook. Of these, Twitter showed the most significant differences with previous studies. Mendeley coverage levels reach those found by previous studies, but it takes up to two years longer for articles to be saved in the...
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paper_title: Do highly cited researchers successfully use the social web?

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Academics can now use the web and the social websites to disseminate scholarly information in a variety of different ways. Although some scholars have taken advantage of these new online opportunities, it is not clear how widespread their uptake is or how much impact they can have. This study assesses the extent to which successful scientists have social web presences, focusing on one influential group: highly cited researchers working at European institutions. It also assesses the impact of these presences. We manually and systematically identified if the European highly cited researchers had profiles in Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Mendeley, Academia and LinkedIn or any content in SlideShare. We then used URL mentions and altmetric indicators to assess the impact of the web presences found. Although most of the scientists had an institutional website of some kind, few had created a profile in any social website investigated, and LinkedIn--the only non-academic site in the list--was the most popular. Scientists having one kind of social web profile were more likely to have another in many cases, especially in the life sciences and engineering. In most cases it was possible to estimate the relative impact of the profiles using a readily available statistic and there were disciplinary differences in the impact of the different kinds of profiles. Most social web profiles had some evidence of uptake, if not impact; nevertheless, the value of the indicators used is unclear.
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paper_title: Use of social media in urology: data from the American Urological Association (AUA)

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Objective To characterise the use of social media among members of the American Urological Association (AUA), as the use of social media in medicine has greatly expanded in recent years. Subjects and Methods In December 2012 to January 2013, the AUA e-mailed a survey with 34 questions on social media use to 2000 randomly selected urologists and 2047 resident/fellow members. Additional data was collected from Symplur analytics on social media use surrounding the AUA Annual Meeting in May 2013. Results In all, 382 (9.4%) surveys were completed, indicating 74% of responders had an online social media account. The most commonly used social media platforms were Facebook (93%), followed in descending order by LinkedIn (46%), Twitter (36%) and Google+ (26%). Being aged 5000 tweets from >600 distinct contributors. Conclusion As of early 2013, among respondents to an e-mail survey, most urologists and urology trainees used some form of social media, and its use in urology conferences has greatly expanded. © 2013 The Authors. BJU International © 2013 BJU International.
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paper_title: Mapping Physician Twitter Networks: Describing How They Work as a First Step in Understanding Connectivity, Information Flow, and Message Diffusion

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Background: Twitter is becoming an important tool in medicine, but there is little information on Twitter metrics. In order to recommend best practices for information dissemination and diffusion, it is important to first study and analyze the networks. Objective: This study describes the characteristics of four medical networks, analyzes their theoretical dissemination potential, their actual dissemination, and the propagation and distribution of tweets. Methods: Open Twitter data was used to characterize four networks: the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the American College of Physicians (ACP). Data were collected between July 2012 and September 2012. Visualization was used to understand the follower overlap between the groups. Actual flow of the tweets for each group was assessed. Tweets were examined using Topsy, a Twitter data aggregator. Results: The theoretical information dissemination potential for the groups is large. A collective community is emerging, where large percentages of individuals are following more than one of the groups. The overlap across groups is small, indicating a limited amount of community cohesion and cross-fertilization. The AMA followers’ network is not as active as the other networks. The AMA posted the largest number of tweets while the AAP posted the fewest. The number of retweets for each organization was low indicating dissemination that is far below its potential. Conclusions: To increase the dissemination potential, medical groups should develop a more cohesive community of shared followers. Tweet content must be engaging to provide a hook for retweeting and reaching potential audience. Next steps call for content analysis, assessment of the behavior and actions of the messengers and the recipients, and a larger-scale study that considers other medical groups using Twitter. [J Med Internet Res 2014;16(4):e107]
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paper_title: Analysis of emergency physicians' Twitter accounts

paper_content:

Background Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media networks for communication between users via short messages. Technology proficient physicians have demonstrated enthusiasm in adopting social media for their work. Objective To identify and create the largest directory of emergency physicians on Twitter, analyse their user accounts and reveal details behind their connections. Methods Several web search tools were used to identify emergency physicians on Twitter with biographies completely or partially written in English. NodeXL software was used to calculate emergency physicians9 Twitter network metrics and create visualisation graphs. Results The authors found 672 Twitter accounts of self-identified emergency physicians. Protected accounts were excluded from the study, leaving 632 for further analysis. Most emergency physicians were located in USA (55.4%), had created their accounts in 2009 (43.4%), used their full personal name (77.5%) and provided a custom profile picture (92.2%). Based on at least one published tweet in the last 15 days, there were 345 (54.6%) active users on 31 December 2011. Active users mostly used mobile devices based on the Apple operating system to publish tweets (69.2%). Visualisation of emergency physicians9 Twitter network revealed many users with no connections with their colleagues, and a small group of most influential users who were highly interconnected. Conclusions Only a small proportion of registered emergency physicians use Twitter. Among them exists a smaller inner network of emergency physicians with strong social bonds that is using Twitter9s full potentials for professional development.
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paper_title: What does Twitter Measure?: Influence of Diverse User Groups in Altmetrics

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The most important goal for digital libraries is to ensure high quality search experience for all kinds of users. To attain this goal, it is necessary to have as much relevant metadata as possible at hand to assess the quality of publications. Recently, a new group of metrics appeared, that has the potential to raise the quality of publication metadata to the next level -- the altmetrics. These metrics try to reflect the impact of publications within the social web. However, currently it is still unclear if and how altmetrics should be used to assess the quality of a publication and how altmetrics are related to classical bibliographical metrics (like e.g. citations). To gain more insights about what kind of concepts are reflected by altmetrics, we conducted an in-depth analysis on a real world dataset crawled from the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Especially, we analyzed if the common approach to regard the users in the social web as one homogeneous group is sensible or if users need to be divided into diverse groups in order to receive meaningful results.
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paper_title: Twitter use at a family medicine conference: analyzing #STFM13.

paper_content:

BACKGROUND ::: The use of social media is expanding in medicine. A few articles sought to describe participant behavior using Twitter at scientific conferences. Family physicians are known as active participants in social media, but their behavior and practices at conferences have not been methodically described. ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: We recorded all public tweets at the 2013 Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) Annual Spring Conference bearing the hashtag #STFM13, using commercially available services. We created a transcript of all tweets for the 5 days of the conference and 3 days before and after. We looked at the total number of tweets, number of original tweets and re-tweets, active users, most prolific users, and impressions. We categorized the content based on (1) Session related, (2) Social, (3) Logistics, (4) Ads, and (5) Other. We compared major metrics (but not content) to the 2012 STFM Annual Spring Conference. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: There were a total of 1,818 tweets from 181 user accounts: 13% of the conference registrants. The top tweeter accounted for over 15% of the total tweets, and the top 10 accounted for over 50% of the total volume. Most original tweets (69.7%) were related to session content. Social content came in second (14.2%), followed by other, logistics, and advertisement (7.6%, 6.9%, 1.6%). ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: This preliminary analysis provides an initial snapshot of twitter activity at a family medicine conference. It may suggest avenues for further inquiry: trend identification, "influencer" identification, and qualitative analysis. Interdisciplinary research should focus on evaluation methods that can assess the quality, value, and impact of tweeting.
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paper_title: The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists

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In the era of social media there are now many different ways that a scientist can build their public profile; the publication of high-quality scientific papers being just one. While social media is a valuable tool for outreach and the sharing of ideas, there is a danger that this form of communication is gaining too high a value and that we are losing sight of key metrics of scientific value, such as citation indices. To help quantify this, I propose the ‘Kardashian Index’, a measure of discrepancy between a scientist’s social media profile and publication record based on the direct comparison of numbers of citations and Twitter followers.
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paper_title: Social media use in the research workflow

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The paper reports on a major international survey, covering 2,000 researchers, which investigated the use of social media in the research workflow. The topic is the second to emerge from the Charleston Observatory, the research adjunct of the popular annual Charleston Conference (http://www.katina.info/conference/). The study shows that social media have found serious application at all points of the research lifecycle, from identifying research opportunities to disseminating findings at the end. The three most popular social media tools in a research setting were those for collaborative authoring, conferencing, and scheduling meetings. The most popular brands used tend to be mainstream anchor technologies or 'household brands', such as Twitter. Age is a poor predictor of social media use in a research context, and humanities and social science scholars avail themselves most of social media. Journals, conference proceedings, and edited books remain the core traditional means of disseminating research, with institutional repositories highly valued as well, but social media have become important complementary channels for disseminating and discovering research.
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paper_title: Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

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In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics", sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. ::: We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone. There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact "flavors", capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.
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paper_title: Influence of study type on Twitter activity for medical research papers

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Twitter has been identified as one of the most popular and promising altmetrics data sources, as it possibly reflects a broader use of research articles by the general public. Several factors, such as document age, scientific discipline, number of authors and document type, have been shown to affect the number of tweets received by scientific documents. The particular meaning of tweets mentioning scholarly papers is, however, not entirely understood and their validity as impact indicators debatable. This study contributes to the understanding of factors influencing Twitter popularity of medical papers investigating differences between medical study types. 162,830 documents indexed in Embase to a medical study type have been analysed for the study type specific tweet frequency. Meta-analyses, systematic reviews and clinical trials were found to be tweeted substantially more frequently than other study types, while all basic research received less attention than the average. The findings correspond well with clinical evidence hierarchies. It is suggested that interest from laymen and patients may be a factor in the observed effects.
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paper_title: Citation Analysis in Twitter: Approaches for Defining and Measuring Information Flows within Tweets during Scientific Conferences

paper_content:

This paper investigates Twitter usage in scientific contexts, particu- larly the use of Twitter during scientific conferences. It proposes a methodology for capturing and analyzing citations/references in Twitter. First results are presented based on the analysis of tweets gathered for two conference hashtags.
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paper_title: Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services

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Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.
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paper_title: Tweets as impact indicators: Examining the implications of automated bot accounts on Twitter

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This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific articles deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the perspective of social media metrics altmetrics, where mentions of scholarly documents on Twitter have been suggested as a means of measuring impact that is both broader and timelier than citations. Our results show that automated Twitter accounts create a considerable amount of tweets to scientific articles and that they behave differently than common social bots, which has critical implications for the use of raw tweet counts in research evaluation and assessment. We discuss some definitions of Twitter cyborgs and bots in scholarly communication and propose distinguishing between different levels of engagement-that is, differentiating between tweeting only bibliographic information to discussing or commenting on the content of a scientific work.
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paper_title: Do altmetrics follow the crowd or does the crowd follow altmetrics?

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Changes are occurring in scholarly communication as scientific discourse and research activities spread across various social media platforms. In this paper, we study altmetrics on the article and journal levels, investigating whether the online attention received by research articles is related to scholarly impact or may be due to other factors. We define a new metric, Journal Social Impact (JSI), based on eleven data sources: CiteULike, Mendeley, F1000, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mainstream news outlets, Google Plus, Pinterest, Reddit, and sites running Stack Exchange (Q&A). We compare JSI against diverse citation-based metrics, and find that JSI significantly correlates with a number of them. These findings indicate that online attention of scholarly articles is related to traditional journal rankings and favors journals with a longer history of scholarly impact. We also find that journal-level altmetrics have strong significant correlations among themselves, compared with the weak correlations among article-level altmetrics. Another finding is that Mendeley and Twitter have the highest usage and coverage of scholarly activities. Among individual altmetrics, we find that the readership of academic social networks have the highest correlations with citation-based metrics. Our findings deepen the overall understanding of altmetrics and can assist in validating them.
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paper_title: How and why scholars cite on Twitter

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Scholars are increasingly using the microblogging service Twitter as a communication platform. Since citing is a central practice of scholarly communication, we investigated whether and how scholars cite on Twitter. We conducted interviews and harvested 46,515 tweets from a sample of 28 scholars and found that they do cite on Twitter, though often indirectly. Twitter citations are part of a fast-moving conversation that participants believe reflects scholarly impact. Twitter citation metrics could augment traditional citation analysis, supporting a "scientometrics 2.0."
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paper_title: Monitoring Academic Conferences: Real-Time Visualization and Retrospective Analysis of Backchannel Conversations

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Social-media-supported academic conferences are becoming increasingly global as people anywhere can participate actively through backchannel conversation. It can be challenging for the conference organizers to integrate the use of social media, to take advantage of the connections between backchannel and front stage, and to encourage the participants to be a part of the broader discussion occurring through social media. The backchannel conversation during academic conference can offer key insights on best practices, and specialized tools and methods are needed to analyze this data. In this paper we present our two fold contribution to enable organizers to gain such insights. First, we introduce Conference Monitor (CM), a real time web-based tweet visualization dashboard to monitor the backchannel conversation during academic conferences. We demonstrate the features of CM, which are designed to help monitor academic conferences, and its application during the conference Theorizing the Web 2012 (TtW12). Its real time visualizations helped identify the popular sessions, the active and important participants, and trending topics. Second, we report on our retrospective analysis of the tweets about the TtW12 conference and the conference-related follower-networks. The 4828 tweets from 593 participants resulted in 8:14 tweets per participant. The 1591 new follower-relations created among the participants during the conference confirmed the overall high volume of new connections created during academic conferences. On average a speaker got more new followers than a non-speaker. A few remote participants also gained comparatively large number of new followers due to the content of their tweets and their perceived importance. There was a positive correlation between the number of new followers of a participant and the number of people who mentioned him/her. Remote participants had a significant level of participation in the backchannel and live streaming helped them to be more engaged.
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paper_title: Collaborative authoring: a case study of the use of a wiki as a tool to keep systematic reviews up to date

paper_content:

BACKGROUND ::: Systematic reviews are recognized as the most effective means of summarizing research evidence. However, they are limited by the time and effort required to keep them up to date. Wikis present a unique opportunity to facilitate collaboration among many authors. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of a wiki as an online collaborative tool for the updating of a type of systematic review known as a scoping review. ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: An existing peer-reviewed scoping review on asynchronous telehealth was previously published on an open, publicly available wiki. Log file analysis, user questionnaires and content analysis were used to collect descriptive and evaluative data on the use of the site from 9 June 2009 to 10 April 2010. Blog postings from referring sites were also analyzed. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: During the 10-month study period, there were a total of 1222 visits to the site, 3996 page views and 875 unique visitors from around the globe. Five unique visitors (0.6% of the total number of visitors) submitted a total of 6 contributions to the site: 3 contributions were made to the article itself, and 3 to the discussion pages. None of the contributions enhanced the evidence base of the scoping review. The commentary about the project in the blogosphere was positive, tempered with some skepticism. ::: ::: ::: INTERPRETATIONS ::: Despite the fact that wikis provide an easy-to-use, free and powerful means to edit information, fewer than 1% of visitors contributed content to the wiki. These results may be a function of limited interest in the topic area, the review methodology itself, lack of familiarity with the wiki, and the incentive structure of academic publishing. Controversial and timely topics in addition to incentives and organizational support for Web 2.0 impact metrics might motivate greater participation in online collaborative efforts to keep scientific knowledge up to date.
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paper_title: How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of ‘alternative metrics’ in scientific publications

paper_content:

In this paper an analysis of the presence and possibilities of altmetrics for bibliometric and performance analysis is carried out. Using the web based tool Impact Story, we collected metrics for 20,000 random publications from the Web of Science. We studied both the presence and distribution of altmetrics in the set of publications, across fields, document types and over publication years, as well as the extent to which altmetrics correlate with citation indicators. The main result of the study is that the altmetrics source that provides the most metrics is Mendeley, with metrics on readerships for 62.6 % of all the publications studied, other sources only provide marginal information. In terms of relation with citations, a moderate spearman correlation (r = 0.49) has been found between Mendeley readership counts and citation indicators. Other possibilities and limitations of these indicators are discussed and future research lines are outlined.
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paper_title: Altmetrics and Other Novel Measures for Scientific Impact

paper_content:

Impact assessment is one of the major drivers in scholarly communication, in particular since the number of available faculty positions and grants has far exceeded the number of applications. Peer review still plays a critical role in evaluating science, but citation-based bibliometric indicators are becoming increasingly important. This chapter looks at a novel set of indicators that can complement both citation analysis and peer review. Altmetrics use indicators gathered in the real-time Social Web to provide immediate feedback about scholarly works. We describe the most important altmetrics and provide a critical assessment of their value and limitations.
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paper_title: Metadata Requirements for Repositories in Health Informatics Research: Evidence from the Analysis of Social Media Citations

paper_content:

Social media have transformed the way modern science is communicated. Although several studies have been focused on the use of social media for the dissemination of scientific knowledge and the measurement of the impact of academic output, we know very little about how academics cite social media in their publications. In order to address this gap, a content analysis was performed on a sample of 629 journal articles in medical informatics. The findings showed the presence of 109 citations to social media resources, the majority of which were blogs and wikis. Social media citations were used more frequently to support the literature review section of articles. However, a fair amount of citations was used in order to document various aspects of the methodology section, such as the data collection and analysis process. The paper concludes with the implications of these findings for metadata design for bibliographic databases (like PubMed and Medline).
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paper_title: Scientific citations in Wikipedia

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The Internet-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most visited Web sites on the Internet, but critics have questioned the quality of entries. An empirical study of Wikipedia found errors in a 2005 sample of science entries. Biased coverage and lack of sources are among the "Wikipedia risks." This paper describes a simple assessment of these aspects by examining the outbound links from Wikipedia articles to articles in scientific journals with a comparison against journal statistics from Journal Citation Reports such as impact factors. The results show an increasing use of structured citation markup and good agreement with citation patterns seen in the scientific literature though with a slight tendency to cite articles in high-impact journals such as Nature and Science. These results increase confidence in Wikipedia as a reliable information resource for science in general.
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paper_title: Wikis and Collaborative Writing Applications in Health Care: A Scoping Review

paper_content:

Background: Collaborative writing applications (eg, wikis and Google Documents) hold the potential to improve the use of evidence in both public health and health care. The rapid rise in their use has created the need for a systematic synthesis of the evidence of their impact as knowledge translation (KT) tools in the health care sector and for an inventory of the factors that affect their use. Objective: Through the Levac six-stage methodology, a scoping review was undertaken to explore the depth and breadth of evidence about the effective, safe, and ethical use of wikis and collaborative writing applications (CWAs) in health care. Methods: Multiple strategies were used to locate studies. Seven scientific databases and 6 grey literature sources were queried for articles on wikis and CWAs published between 2001 and September 16, 2011. In total, 4436 citations and 1921 grey literature items were screened. Two reviewers independently reviewed citations, selected eligible studies, and extracted data using a standardized form. We included any paper presenting qualitative or quantitative empirical evidence concerning health care and CWAs. We defined a CWA as any technology that enables the joint and simultaneous editing of a webpage or an online document by many end users. We performed qualitative content analysis to identify the factors that affect the use of CWAs using the Gagnon framework and their effects on health care using the Donabedian framework. Results: Of the 111 studies included, 4 were experimental, 5 quasi-experimental, 5 observational, 52 case studies, 23 surveys about wiki use, and 22 descriptive studies about the quality of information in wikis. We classified them by theme: patterns of use of CWAs (n=26), quality of information in existing CWAs (n=25), and CWAs as KT tools (n=73). A high prevalence of CWA use (ie, more than 50%) is reported in 58% (7/12) of surveys conducted with health care professionals and students. However, we found only one longitudinal study showing that CWA use is increasing in health care. Moreover, contribution rates remain low and the quality of information contained in different CWAs needs improvement. We identified 48 barriers and 91 facilitators in 4 major themes (factors related to the CWA, users’ knowledge and attitude towards CWAs, human environment, and organizational environment). We also found 57 positive and 23 negative effects that we classified into processes and outcomes. Conclusions: Although we found some experimental and quasi-experimental studies of the effectiveness and safety of CWAs as educational and KT interventions, the vast majority of included studies were observational case studies about CWAs being used by health professionals and patients. More primary research is needed to find ways to address the different barriers to their use and to make these applications more useful for different stakeholders. [J Med Internet Res 2013;15(10):e210]
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paper_title: Wikipedia as Public Scholarship: Communicating Our Impact Online

paper_content:

To contribute to the forum asking “Has Communication Research Made a Difference?,” this essay examines whether communication scholarship makes a difference (a) to those who search for information online, (b) in the sense that a primary way our research can make a difference is through its accessibility, and (c) by using the criteria of its presence (or absence) on Wikipedia. In this essay, we reason that Wikipedia is a useful benchmark for online accessibility of public scholarship in that it provides immediate, freely available information to today's diverse global public seeking online answers to questions and relief from problems.
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paper_title: Expert participation on Wikipedia: barriers and opportunities

paper_content:

On the occasion of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, the Chronicle wrote that, nowadays, the project does not represent "the bottom layer of authority, nor the top, but in fact the highest layer without formal vetting" and, as such, it can serve as "an ideal bridge between the validated and unvalidated Web". An increasing number of university students use Wikipedia for "pre-research", as part of their course assignments or research projects. Yet many among academics, scientists and experts turn their noses up at the thought of contributing to Wikipedia, despite a growing number of calls from the expert community to join the project. The Association for Psychological Science launched an initiative to get the scientific psychology community involved in improving the coverage and quality of articles in their field; biomedical experts recently called upon their peers to help make public health information in Wikipedia rigorous and complete; historians have recently started to contribute references to Wikipedia in an effort to make their scholarly work more easily accessible to a broad readership; chemists are curating Wikipedia to include structured metadata in articles on chemical compounds. The Wikimedia Foundation itself is exploring strategies to engage with the expert community and with higher education at large, as part of initiatives such as USPP or the expert review proposal. ::: ::: These calls for participation, however, remain sporadic and most experts-- despite goodwill to contribute--still perceive major barriers to participation, which typically include issues of a technical, social and cultural nature, from the lack of incentives from the perspective of a professional career, to the poor recognition of one’s expertise within Wikipedia to issues of social interaction. In combination with the apparent anomaly of collaborative--and often anonymous--authorship and the resulting fluidity of Wikipedia articles, these factors create an environment that significantly differs from the ones experts are accustomed to. ::: ::: There has been so far only anecdotal evidence on what keeps experts (defined in the broadest possible sense to include academics, but also expert professionals in industry and in the public sector, as well as research students) from contributing to Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Research Committee ran a survey on expert participation between February and April 2011 with over 3K respondents to try and turn anecdotes about expert participation into data. The aim of this talk is to present the results of the survey and tackle questions such as: the different perception of participation in Wikipedia across academic fields; the effects of expertise, gender, discipline, wiki literacy on participation; the gap between shared attitudes and individual drivers of participation; the relation between participation in Wikipedia and attitudes towards open access and open science.
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paper_title: Geographic variation in social media metrics: an analysis of Latin American journal articles

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how the potential of altmetrics varies around the world by measuring the percentage of articles with non-zero metrics (coverage) for articles published from a developing region (Latin America). Design/methodology/approach – This study uses article metadata from a prominent Latin American journal portal, SciELO, and combines it with altmetrics data from Altmetric.com and with data collected by author-written scripts. The study is primarily descriptive, focusing on coverage levels disaggregated by year, country, subject area, and language. Findings – Coverage levels for most of the social media sources studied was zero or negligible. Only three metrics had coverage levels above 2 per cent – Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook. Of these, Twitter showed the most significant differences with previous studies. Mendeley coverage levels reach those found by previous studies, but it takes up to two years longer for articles to be saved in the...
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paper_title: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

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Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds. UPDATE: see details of how the data were collected for this article in the supplementary information. UPDATE 2 (28 March 2006). The results reported in this news story and their interpretation have been disputed by Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nature responded to these objections .
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paper_title: Academic opinions of Wikipedia and Open Access publishing

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine academics’ awareness of and attitudes towards Wikipedia and Open Access journals for academic publishing to better understand the perceived benefits and challenges of these models. Design/methodology/approach – Bases for analysis include comparison of the models, enumeration of their advantages and disadvantages, and investigation of Wikipedia's web structure in terms of potential for academic publishing. A web survey was administered via department-based invitations and listservs. Findings – The survey results show that: Wikipedia has perceived advantages and challenges in comparison to the Open Access model; the academic researchers’ increased familiarity is associated with increased comfort with these models; and the academic researchers’ attitudes towards these models are associated with their familiarity, academic environment, and professional status. Research limitations/implications – The major limitation of the study is sample size. The result of a...
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paper_title: Proteopedia- a scientific 'wiki' bridging the rift between three-dimensional structure and function of biomacromolecules

paper_content:

Many scientists lack the background to fully utilize the wealth of solved three-dimensional biomacromolecule structures. Thus, a resource is needed to present structure/function information in a user-friendly manner to a broad scientific audience. Proteopedia http://www.proteopedia.org is an interactive, wiki web-resource whose pages have embedded three-dimensional structures surrounded by descriptive text containing hyperlinks that change the appearance (view, representations, colors, labels) of the adjacent three-dimensional structure to reflect the concept explained in the text.
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paper_title: Wikipedia for academic publishing: advantages and challenges

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of Wikipedia as a venue for academic publishing.Design/methodology/approach – By looking at other sources and studying Wikipedia structures, the paper compares the processes of publishing a peer‐reviewed article in Wikipedia and the open access journal model, discusses the advantages and challenges of adopting Wikipedia in academic publishing, and provides suggestions on how to address the challenges.Findings – Compared to an open access journal model, Wikipedia has several advantages for academic publishing: it is less expensive, quicker, more widely read, and offers a wider variety of articles. There are also several major challenges in adopting Wikipedia in the academic community: the web site structure is not well suited to academic publications; the site is not integrated with common academic search engines such as Google Scholar or with university libraries; and there are concerns among some members of the academic community about the s...
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paper_title: The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics

paper_content:

Activity of modern scholarship creates online footprints galore. Along with traditional metrics of research quality, such as citation counts, online images of researchers and institutions increasingly matter in evaluating academic impact, decisions about grant allocation, and promotion. We examined 400 biographical Wikipedia articles on academics from four scientific fields to test if being featured in the world’s largest online encyclopedia is correlated with higher academic notability (assessed through citation counts). We found no statistically significant correlation between Wikipedia articles metrics (length, number of edits, number of incoming links from other articles, etc.) and academic notability of the mentioned researchers. We also did not find any evidence that the scientists with better WP representation are necessarily more prominent in their fields. In addition, we inspected the Wikipedia coverage of notable scientists sampled from Thomson Reuters list of ‘highly cited researchers’. In each of the examined fields, Wikipedia failed in covering notable scholars properly. Both findings imply that Wikipedia might be producing an inaccurate image of academics on the front end of science. By shedding light on how public perception of academic progress is formed, this study alerts that a subjective element might have been introduced into the hitherto structured system of academic evaluation.
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paper_title: Reinventing academic publishing online. Part II: A socio-technical vision

paper_content:

Part I of this paper outlined the limitations of feudal academic knowledge exchange and predicted its decline as cross-disciplinary research expands. Part II now suggests the next evolutionary step is democratic online knowledge exchange, run by the academic many rather than the few. Using socio-technical tools it is possible to accept all, evaluate all and publish all academic documents. Editors and reviewers will remain, but their role will change, from gatekeepers to guides. However, the increase in knowledge throughput can only be supported by activating the academic community as a whole. Yet that is what socio-technical systems do --- activate people to increase common gains. Part 1 argued that scholars must do this or be left behind in the dust of progress. The design proposed here is neither wiki, nor e-journal, nor electronic repository, nor reputation system, but a hybrid of these and other socio-technical functions. It supports print publishing as a permanent archive byproduct useful to a living, online knowledge exchange community. It could also track academic submissions, provide performance transcripts to promotion committees, enable hyperlinks, support attribution, allow data-source sharing, retain anonymous reviewing and support relevance and rigor in evaluation. Rather than a single "super" KES, a network of online systems united by a common vision of democratic knowledge exchange is proposed.
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paper_title: Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

paper_content:

Altmetrics, indices based on social media platforms and tools, have recently emerged as alternative means of measuring scholarly impact. Such indices assume that scholars in fact populate online social environments, and interact with scholarly products in the social web. We tested this assumption by examining the use and coverage of social media environments amongst a sample of bibliometricians examining both their own use of online platforms and the use of their papers on social reference managers. As expected, coverage varied: 82 % of articles published by sampled bibliometricians were included in Mendeley libraries, while only 28 % were included in CiteULike. Mendeley bookmarking was moderately correlated (.45) with Scopus citation counts. We conducted a survey among the participants of the STI2012 participants. Over half of respondents asserted that social media tools were affecting their professional lives, although uptake of online tools varied widely. 68 % of those surveyed had LinkedIn accounts, while Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate each claimed a fifth of respondents. Nearly half of those responding had Twitter accounts, which they used both personally and professionally. Surveyed bibliometricians had mixed opinions on altmetrics' potential; 72 % valued download counts, while a third saw potential in tracking articles' influence in blogs, Wikipedia, reference managers, and social media. Altogether, these findings suggest that some online tools are seeing substantial use by bibliometricians, and that they present a potentially valuable source of impact data.
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paper_title: A comparative study of academic and Wikipedia ranking

paper_content:

In addition to its broad popularity Wikipedia is also widely used for scholarly purposes. Many Wikipedia pages pertain to academic papers, scholars and topics providing a rich ecology for scholarly uses. Scholarly references and mentions on Wikipedia may thus shape the "societal impact" of a certain scholarly communication item, but it is not clear whether they shape actual "academic impact". In this paper we compare the impact of papers, scholars, and topics according to two different measures, namely scholarly citations and Wikipedia mentions. Our results show that academic and Wikipedia impact are positively correlated. Papers, authors, and topics that are mentioned on Wikipedia have higher academic impact than those are not mentioned. Our findings validate the hypothesis that Wikipedia can help assess the impact of scholarly publications and underpin relevance indicators for scholarly retrieval or recommendation systems.
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paper_title: Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

paper_content:

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics", sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. ::: We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone. There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact "flavors", capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.
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paper_title: Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia readers and readership

paper_content:

Hundreds of scholarly studies have investigated various aspects of Wikipedia. Although a number of literature reviews have provided overviews of this vast body of research, none has specifically focused on the readers of Wikipedia and issues concerning its readership. In this systematic literature review, we review 99 studies to synthesize current knowledge regarding the readership of Wikipedia and provide an analysis of research methods employed. The scholarly research has found that Wikipedia is popular not only for lighter topics such as entertainment but also for more serious topics such as health and legal information. Scholars, librarians, and students are common users, and Wikipedia provides a unique opportunity for educating students in digital literacy. We conclude with a summary of key findings, implications for researchers, and implications for the Wikipedia community.
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paper_title: Organizational identity, meaning, and values: analysis of social media guideline and policy documents

paper_content:

With the increasing use of social media by students, researchers, administrative staff, and faculty in post-secondary education (PSE), a number of institutions have developed guideline and policy documents to set standards for social media use. In this study we analyze social media guidelines and policies across 250 PSE institutions from 10 countries using latent semantic analysis. This initial finding produced a list of 36 universal topics. Subsequently, chi-squared tests were employed to identify distribution differences of content-related factors between American and Non-American PSE institutions. This analysis offered a high-level summary of unstructured text data on the topic of social media guidance. The results include a comprehensive list of recommendations for developing social media guidelines and policies, and a database of social media guideline and policy documents for the PSE sector and other related organizations.
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paper_title: Social Software in Academia: Three Studies on Users’ Acceptance of Web 2.0 Services

paper_content:

paper presents a summary of the results of three surveys, questioning different groups of users on their usage of social software tools in academic settings. The first survey addressed students across various disciplines, the second one addressed only students in information science and related disciplines, and the third one addressed researchers and university teachers across several disciplines. The different studies had slightly different foci (and thus did not comprise the same set of questions), but all considered aspects such of 'which Web 2.0 services are known?' and 'how are they used?' In this paper, the different survey results related to use of social software are summed up and compared.
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paper_title: Exploring altmetrics in an emerging country context

paper_content:

The study of altmetrics is relatively new, and the little that is known about altmetrics is only known for journals and articles from a limited set of contexts (publication venues and subject areas). The use of PLOS, arXiv.org, PubMed, Web of Science, or of a few well-established journals like Nature and Science introduces a selection bias that calls into question the generalizability of reported results. For example, we already know that altmetrics related to mentions in blogs are heavily influenced by the makeup of bloggers themselves and the journals they tend to blog about, both of which introduce a strong bias in favour high-impact life science journals (Shema et al., 2012). There is therefore a need to study the altmetrics of journals and articles published and read in other contexts, including research that is published and read in regions of the world beyond the global North, as well as in other languages beyond English.
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paper_title: PeerJ --A case study in improving research collaboration at the journal level

paper_content:

PeerJ Inc. is the Open Access publisher of PeerJ a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal and PeerJ PrePrints an un-peer-reviewed or collaboratively reviewed preprint server, both serving the biological, medical and health sciences.The Editorial Criteria of PeerJ the journal are similar to those of PLOS ONE in that all submissions are judged only on their scientific and methodological soundness not on subjective determinations of impact, or degree of advance. PeerJ's peer-review process is managed by an Editorial Board of 800 and an Advisory Board of 20 including 5 Nobel Laureates. Editor listings by subject area are at: https://peerj.com/academic-boards/subjects/ and the Advisory Board is at: https://peerj.com/academic-boards/advisors/.In the context of Understanding Research Collaboration, there are several unique aspects of the PeerJ set-up which will be of interest to readers of this special issue.
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paper_title: For what it’s worth – the open peer review landscape

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold, first, to discuss the current and future issues around post-publication open peer review. Second, to highlight some of the main protagonists and platforms that encourages open peer review, pre-and post-publication. Design/methodology/approach – The first part of the paper aims to discuss the facilitators and barriers that will enable and prevent academics engaging with the new and established platforms of scholarly communication and review. These issues are covered with the intention of proposing further dialogue within the academic community that ultimately address researchers’ concerns, whilst continuing to nurture a progressive approach to scholarly communication and review. The paper will continue to look at the prominent open post-publication platforms and tools and discuss whether in the future it will become a standard model. Findings – The paper identifies several problems, not exclusive to open peer review that could inhibit academics from being ope...
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paper_title: Effect of open peer review on quality of reviews and on reviewers' recommendations: a randomised trial

paper_content:

Abstract Objectives : To examine the effect on peer review of asking reviewers to have their identity revealed to the authors of the paper. Design : Randomised trial. Consecutive eligible papers were sent to two reviewers who were randomised to have their identity revealed to the authors or to remain anonymous. Editors and authors were blind to the intervention. Main outcome measures : The quality of the reviews was independently rated by two editors and the corresponding author using a validated instrument. Additional outcomes were the time taken to complete the review and the recommendation regarding publication. A questionnaire survey was undertaken of the authors of a cohort of manuscripts submitted for publication to find out their views on open peer review. Results : Two editors9 assessments were obtained for 113out of 125manuscripts, and the corresponding author9s assessment was obtained for 105.Reviewers randomised to be asked to be identified were 12% (95% confidence interval 0.2% to 24%) more likely to decline to review than reviewers randomised to remain anonymous (35% v 23%). There was no significant difference in quality (scored on a scale of 1to 5) between anonymous reviewers (3.06(SD 0.72)) and identified reviewers (3.09(0.68)) (P=0.68, 95% confidence interval for difference −align=baseline>0.19 to 0.12), and no significant difference in the recommendation regarding publication or time taken to review the paper. The editors9 quality score for reviews (3.05(SD 0.70)) was significantly higher than that of authors (2.90(0.87))(P 0.26 to − align=baseline>0.03). Most authors were in favour of open peer review. Conclusions : Asking reviewers to consent to being identified to the author had no important effect on the quality of the review, the recommendation regarding publication, or the time taken to review, but it significantly increased the likelihood of reviewers declining to review.
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paper_title: F1000 Recommendations as a Potential New Data Source for Research Evaluation: A Comparison With Citations

paper_content:

F1000 is a postpublication peer review service for biological and medical research. F1000 recommends important publications in the biomedical literature, and from this perspective F1000 could be an interesting tool for research evaluation. By linking the complete database of F1000 recommendations to the Web of Science bibliographic database, we are able to make a comprehensive comparison between F1000 recommendations and citations. We find that about 2% of the publications in the biomedical literature receive at least one F1000 recommendation. Recommended publications on average receive 1.30 recommendations, and more than 90% of the recommendations are given within half a year after a publication has appeared. There turns out to be a clear correlation between F1000 recommendations and citations. However, the correlation is relatively weak, at least weaker than the correlation between journal impact and citations. More research is needed to identify the main reasons for differences between recommendations and citations in assessing the impact of publications.
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paper_title: Rewarding Peer Reviewers: Maintaining the Integrity of Science Communication

paper_content:

This article overviews currently available options for rewarding peer reviewers. Rewards and incentives may help maintain the quality and integrity of scholarly publications. Publishers around the world implemented a variety of financial and nonfinancial mechanisms for incentivizing their best reviewers. None of these is proved effective on its own. A strategy of combined rewards and credits for the reviewers1 creative contributions seems a workable solution. Opening access to reviews and assigning publication credits to the best reviews is one of the latest achievements of digitization. Reviews, posted on academic networking platforms, such as Publons, add to the transparency of the whole system of peer review. Reviewer credits, properly counted and displayed on individual digital profiles, help distinguish the best contributors, invite them to review and offer responsible editorial posts.
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paper_title: Defining and Characterizing Open Peer Review: A Review of the Literature

paper_content:

Changes in scholarly publishing have resulted in a move toward openness. To this end, new, open models of peer review are emerging. While the scholarly literature has examined and discussed open peer review, no established definition of it exists, nor are there uniform implementations of open peer review processes. This article examines the literature discussing open peer review, identifies common open peer review definitions, and describes eight common characteristics of open peer review: signed review, disclosed review, editor-mediated review, transparent review, crowd-sourced review, pre-publication review, synchronous review, and post-publication review. This article further discusses benefits and challenges to the scholarly publishing community posed by open peer review and concludes that open peer review can and should exist within the current scholarly publishing paradigm.
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paper_title: Bias in peer review

paper_content:

Research on bias in peer review examines scholarly communication and funding processes to assess the epistemic and social legitimacy of the mechanisms by which knowledge communities vet and self-regulate their work. Despite vocal concerns, a closer look at the empirical and methodological limitations of research on bias raises questions about the existence and extent of many hypothesized forms of bias. In addition, the notion of bias is predicated on an implicit ideal that, once articulated, raises questions about the normative implications of research on bias in peer review. This review provides a brief description of the function, history, and scope of peer review; articulates and critiques the conception of bias unifying research on bias in peer review; characterizes and examines the empirical, methodological, and normative claims of bias in peer review research; and assesses possible alternatives to the status quo. We close by identifying ways to expand conceptions and studies of bias to contend with the complexity of social interactions among actors involved directly and indirectly in peer review. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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paper_title: Social Media and Marketing of Higher Education: A Review of the Literature

paper_content:

The emergence of social media has revolutionized the practice of communication in two fundamental ways. First, social media have made it possible for one person to send an instant message to millions of others worldwide. Second and perhaps more important, social media make it possible to establish a two-way communication channel between the sender and receivers or simply between receivers or “followers” outside the control of the original sender. Social media, therefore, transcend the traditional bureaucracy when it comes to marketing or seeking information from an institution. We conducted a review of the literature to find out how institutions of higher education are leveraging social media for recruitment and admissions purposes, and whether prospective students use social media in their college search process. Our findings indicate that social media use by institutions of higher education is on the rise, yet it is unclear whether content on university social media pages influences prospects’ choice-making processes.
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paper_title: Social Networking as an Admission Tool: A Case Study in Success

paper_content:

The concept of social networking, the focus of this article, targets the development of online communities in higher education, and in particular, as part of the admission process. A successful case study of a university is presented on how one university has used this tool to compete for students. A discussion including suggestions on how to enhance the success of this tool in your recruitment process is also provided.
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paper_title: A Case Study of Israeli Higher-Education Institutes Sharing Scholarly Information with the Community via Social Networks.

paper_content:

Abstract The purpose of this study is to empirically examine cases in which Social Networking Sites (SNS) are being utilized for scholarly purposes by higher-education institutes in Israel. The research addresses questions regarding content patterns, activity patterns, and interactivity within Facebook and Twitter accounts of these institutes. Research population comprises of 47 Facebook accounts and 26 Twitter accounts of Israeli universities or colleges and/or sub-divisions within these institutes. In addition to descriptive statistics, all tweets within Twitter accounts were analyzed and classified into categories, based on their content, for better understanding of how they can facilitate informal learning. Research findings suggest that SNS promotes knowledge sharing, thereby facilitating informal learning within the community; SNS open academic institutes to the community altogether. Still, SNS were utilized in an assimilation mode, i.e. while the potential is high for using special features enabled by SNS as well as unique sharing of information modes, de facto use of these special features was extremely low. However, contrary to the relatively high dropout rates of SNS' personal accounts, many academic accounts were frequently active for long periods of time. This may indicate that SNS activity which is based on sharing of knowledge as well as on social interaction has better sustainability prospects. Usage and content patterns of these accounts corresponded to parallel patterns in the Israeli higher-education community in “real” life, hence reinforcing the role of these institutes within the community. Overall, this study implies that the potential of SNS as means of sharing academic knowledge in higher education institutes in Israel has not been actualized yet, but is indeed being explored by these organizations as well as by the community.
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paper_title: Enriched Audience Engagement Through Twitter: Should More Academic Radiology Departments Seize the Opportunity?

paper_content:

PURPOSE ::: The aim of this study was to evaluate use of the microblogging social network Twitter by academic radiology departments (ARDs) in the United States. ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: Twitter was searched to identify all accounts corresponding with United States ARDs. All original tweets from identified accounts over a recent 3-month period (August to October 2014) were archived. Measures of account activity, as well as tweet and link content, were summarized. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: Fifteen ARDs (8.2%) had Twitter accounts. Ten (5.5%) had "active" accounts, with ≥1 tweet over the 3-month period. Active accounts averaged 711 ± 925 followers (maximum, 2,885) and 61 ± 93 tweets (maximum, 260) during the period. Among 612 tweets from active accounts, content most commonly related to radiology-related education (138), dissemination of departmental research (102), general departmental or hospital promotional material (62), departmental awards or accomplishments (60), upcoming departmental lectures (59), other hospital-related news (55), medical advice or information for patients (38), local community events or news (29), social media and medicine (27), and new departmental or hospital hires or expansion (19). Eighty percent of tweets (490 of 612) included 315 unique external links. Most frequent categories of link sources were picture-, video-, and music-sharing websites (89); the ARD's website or blog (83); peer-reviewed journal articles (40); the hospital's or university's website (34), the lay press (28), and Facebook (14). ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: Twitter provides ARDs the opportunity to engage their own staff members, the radiology community, the department's hospital, and patients, through a broad array of content. ARDs frequently used Twitter for promotional and educational purposes. Because only a small fraction of ARDs actively use Twitter, more departments are encouraged to take advantage of this emerging communication tool.
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paper_title: Friend or faculty: Social networking sites, dual relationships, and context collapse in higher education

paper_content:

Students and faculty have always interacted informally, on campus and off. Social networking sites (SNSs), like Facebook, introduce another space in which they interact, contributing to a blurring of boundaries between professional and personal personas. Communications on SNSs may be seen as simply an extension of on- and off-campus lives, and hence fall under the same policies governing institutional codes of conduct. The medium however, allowing for the capture and broadcast of events in academic and everyday lives, merits special considerations for contemporary faculty and administrators. The objective of this critical review is synthesize literature discussing dual relationships, context collapse, and digital persistence to contextualize and inform policy development regarding the use of SNSs in higher education. The review will contribute to discussions and decision-making on what should be done in response to these ubiquitous and novel channels for communication, connection and disclosure, and promote awareness of the implications for the connections fostered and the digital traces left behind in networked social spaces.
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paper_title: Innovative online faculty development utilizing the power of social media.

paper_content:

Abstract Objective Faculty development (FD) is important for continued professional development, but expense and distance remain challenging. These challenges could be minimized by the free and asynchronous nature of social media (SM). We sought to determine the utility and effectiveness of conducting a national online FD activity on Facebook by assessing participants' perceptions and use and facilitators' challenges. Methods An educational activity of a national FD program was managed on a closed Facebook group. Activities included postings of educational technology goals, abstracting an article, and commenting on peers' postings. Sources of quantitative data included the Facebook postings and the survey responses. Surveys before, after, and 6 months after the activity assessed knowledge, attitudes and self-reported behaviors. Sources of qualitative data were the open-ended survey questions and the content of the Facebook postings. Results All participants completed the FD activity and evaluations, yielding 38 postings and 115 comments. Before the activity, 88% had a personal Facebook account, 64% were somewhat/very confident using Facebook, 77% thought SM would be useful for professional networking, and 12% had used it professionally. Six months after the activity, professional usage had increased to 35%. Continued use of Facebook for future presentations of this FD activity was recommended by 76%. Qualitative analysis yielded 12 types of Facebook postings and 7 themes related to using SM for FD. Conclusions Conducting a national FD activity on Facebook yielded excellent participation rates and positive participant impressions, and it affected professional usage. Facebook may become an additional tool in the educator's toolbox for FD as a result of its acceptability and accessibility.
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paper_title: Organizational identity, meaning, and values: analysis of social media guideline and policy documents

paper_content:

With the increasing use of social media by students, researchers, administrative staff, and faculty in post-secondary education (PSE), a number of institutions have developed guideline and policy documents to set standards for social media use. In this study we analyze social media guidelines and policies across 250 PSE institutions from 10 countries using latent semantic analysis. This initial finding produced a list of 36 universal topics. Subsequently, chi-squared tests were employed to identify distribution differences of content-related factors between American and Non-American PSE institutions. This analysis offered a high-level summary of unstructured text data on the topic of social media guidance. The results include a comprehensive list of recommendations for developing social media guidelines and policies, and a database of social media guideline and policy documents for the PSE sector and other related organizations.
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paper_title: Riding the crest of the altmetrics wave: How librarians can help prepare faculty for the next generation of research impact metrics

paper_content:

As scholars migrate into online spaces like Mendeley, blogs, Twitter, and more, they leave new traces of once-invisible interactions like reading, saving, discussing, and recommending. Observing these traces can inform new metrics of scholarly influence and impact -- so-called "altmetrics." Stakeholders in academia are beginning to discuss how and where altmetrics can be useful towards evaluating a researcher's academic contribution. As this interest grows, libraries are in a unique position to help support an informed dialog on campus. We suggest that librarians can provide this support in three main ways: informing emerging conversations with the latest research, supporting experimentation with emerging altmetrics tools, and engaging in early altmetrics education and outreach. We include examples and lists of resources to help librarians fill these roles.
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paper_title: A Look at Altmetrics and Its Growing Significance to Research Libraries

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This document serves as an informational review of the emerging field and practices of alternative metrics or altmetrics. It is intended to be used by librarians and faculty members in research libraries and universities to better understand the trends and challenges associated with altmetrics in higher education. It is also intended to be used by research libraries to offer guidance on how to participate in shaping this emerging field.
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paper_title: New opportunities for repositories in the age of altmetrics

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Editor's Summary ::: ::: ::: ::: For institutional repositories, alternative metrics reflecting online activity present valuable indicators of interest in their holdings that can supplement traditional usage statistics. A variable mix of built-in metrics is available through popular repository platforms: Digital Commons, DSpace and EPrints. These may include download counts at the collection and/or item level, search terms, total and unique visitors, page views and social media and bookmarking metrics; additional data may be available with special plug-ins. Data provide different types of information valuable for repository managers, university administrators and authors. They can reflect both scholarly and popular impact, show readership, reflect an institution's output, justify tenure and promotion and indicate direction for collection management. Practical considerations for implementing altmetrics include service costs, technical support, platform integration and user interest. Altmetrics should not be used for author ranking or comparison, and altmetrics sources should be regularly reevaluated for relevance.
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paper_title: Altmetrics: Rethinking the Way We Measure

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Altmetrics is the focus for this edition of “Balance Point.” The column editor invited Finbar Galligan who has gained considerable knowledge of altmetrics to co-author the column. Altmetrics, their relationship to traditional metrics, their importance, uses, potential impacts, and possible future directions are examined. The authors conclude that altmetrics have an important future role to play and that they offer the potential to revolutionize the analysis of the value and impact of scholarly work.
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paper_title: Social Networking Sites Emerging and Essential Tools for Communication in Dermatology

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IMPORTANCE ::: The use of social media by dermatology journals and professional and patient-centered dermatology organizations remains largely unknown and, to our knowledge, has yet to be fully evaluated. ::: ::: ::: OBJECTIVE ::: To evaluate and quantify the extent of involvement of dermatology journals, professional dermatology organizations, and dermatology-related patient advocate groups on social networking sites. ::: ::: ::: DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS ::: We obtained an archived list of 102 current dermatology journals from SCImago on the World Wide Web and used the list to investigate Facebook, Twitter, and individual journal websites for the presence of social media accounts. We identified professional and patient-centered dermatology organization activity on social networks through queries of predetermined search terms on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The activity of each entity was documented by recording the following metrics of popularity: the numbers of Facebook "likes," Twitter "followers," and LinkedIn "members." ::: ::: ::: MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES ::: The numbers of Facebook likes, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn members corresponding to each dermatology journal and each professional and patient-related dermatology organization. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: On July 17, 2012, of the 102 dermatology journals ranked by SCImago, 12.7% were present on Facebook and 13.7% on Twitter. We identified popular dermatology journals based on Facebook likes and Twitter followers, led by the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology and Dermatology Times, respectively. Popular professional dermatology organizations included dermRounds Dermatology Network (11 251 likes on Facebook and 2900 followers on Twitter). The most popular dermatology patient-centered organizations were the Skin Cancer Foundation (20 119 likes on Facebook), DermaTalk (21 542 followers on Twitter), and the National Psoriasis Foundation (200 members on LinkedIn). ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE ::: Patient-centered and professional dermatology organizations use social networking sites; however, academic journals tend to lag behind significantly. Although some journals are active in social media, most have yet to recognize the potential benefits of fully embracing popular social networks.
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paper_title: International Urology Journal Club via Twitter: 12-Month Experience

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Abstract Background Online journal clubs have increasingly been utilised to overcome the limitations of the traditional journal club. However, to date, no reported online journal club is available for international participation. Objective To present a 12-mo experience from the International Urology Journal Club, the world's first international journal club using Twitter, an online micro-blogging platform, and to demonstrate the viability and sustainability of such a journal club. Design, setting, and participants #urojc is an asynchronous 48-h monthly journal club moderated by the Twitter account @iurojc. The open invitation discussions focussed on papers typically published within the previous 2–4 wk. Data were obtained via third-party Twitter analysis services. Outcome measurements and statistical analysis Outcomes analysed included number of total and new users, number of tweets, and qualitative analysis of the relevance of tweets. Analysis was undertaken using GraphPad software, Microsoft Excel, and thematic qualitative analysis. Results and limitations The first 12 mo saw a total of 189 unique users representing 19 countries and 6 continents. There was a mean of 39 monthly participants that included 14 first-time participants per month. The mean number of tweets per month was 195 of which 62% represented original tweets directly related to the topic of discussion and 22% represented retweets of original posts. A mean of 130 832 impressions, or reach , were created per month. The @iurojc moderator account has accumulated >1000 followers. The study is limited by potentially incomplete data extracted by third-party Twitter analysers. Conclusions Social media provides a potential for enormous international communication that has not been possible in the past. We believe the pioneering #urojc is both viable and sustainable. There is unlimited scope for journal clubs in other fields to follow the example of #urojc and utilise online portals to revitalise the traditional journal club while fostering international relationships.
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paper_title: International palliative care journal club on twitter:experience so far

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Introduction @hpmJC (hospice and palliative medicine Journal Club, #hpmJC) was launched in February 2014 on the social networking service Twitter, as a regular international journal club for palliative care. The journal club aims to encourage critical analysis of research methods and findings, and to promote evidence based practice, by providing a forum to discuss latest research findings. Aim(s) and method(s) To analyse the use and reach of #hpmJC, from the first journal club in February 2014, to date. All data on Twitter posts (tweets) using #hpmJC were extracted from Twitter using analytic tools Sysomos and Symplur. Outcomes included number of tweets, number of unique users, users9 designated country, and impressions (potential number of accounts reached). Results 7 journal clubs have taken place. 2360 tweets were sent, from 230 individual Twitter accounts and with contributions from people in 17 countries. For contributors whose country of origin is known (59%), most were based in the UK (41%) or USA (26%).Tweets from resource-poor countries were initially uncommon but increased over the time period. The mean number of contributors at each journal club was 32. The potential reach of #hpmJC varied, but for the most recent journal club was 290,802 unique users. Conclusion(s) Social media provides opportunities to share expertise and disseminate information globally, transcending geographical boundaries. @hpmJC has been used to start a viable and sustainable online multidisciplinary journal club with wider geographical spread and potential reach than a traditional journal club. Strategies to increase participation in resource-poor countries are being developed.
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paper_title: Journal Club via social media: authors take note of the impact of #BlueJC

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Journal Clubs inform clinicians, instil research literacy, andembed evidence-based practice. They also offer the oppor-tunity for post publication peer-review to identify weak-nesses in research, make suggestions for improvement, anddiscover implications for future research and clinical prac-tice; however, the deliberations of Journal Clubs are rarelyfed back for reﬂections from editors and authors.
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paper_title: The emerging use of Twitter by urological journals.

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Objective ::: ::: To assess the emerging use of Twitter by urological journals. ::: ::: ::: ::: Methods ::: ::: A search of the Journal of Citation Reports 2012 was performed to identify urological journals. These journals were then searched on Twitter.com. Each journal website was accessed for links to social media (SoMe). The number of ‘tweets’, followers and age of profile was determined. To evaluate the content, over a 6-month period (November 2013 to April 2014), all tweets were scrutinised on the journals Twitter profiles. To assess SoMe influence, the Klout score of each journal was also calculated. ::: ::: ::: ::: Results ::: ::: In all, 33 urological journals were identified. Eight (24.2%) had Twitter profiles. The mean (range) number of tweets and followers was 557 (19–1809) and 1845 (82–3692), respectively. The mean (range) age of the twitter profiles was 952 (314–1758) days with an average 0.88 tweets/day. A Twitter profile was associated with a higher mean impact factor of the journal (mean [sd] 3.588 [3.05] vs 1.78 [0.99], P = 0.013). Over a 6-month period, November 2013 to April 2014, the median (range) number of tweets per profile was 82 (2–415) and the median (range) number of articles linked to tweets was 73 (0–336). Of these 710 articles, 152 were Level 1 evidence-based articles, 101 Level 2, 278 Level 3 and 179 Level 4. The median (range) Klout score was 47 (19–58). The Klout scores of major journals did not exactly mirror their impact factors. ::: ::: ::: ::: Conclusion ::: ::: SoMe is increasingly becoming an adjunct to traditional teaching methods, due to its convenient and user-friendly platform. Recently, many of the leading urological journals have used Twitter to highlight significant articles of interest to readers.
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paper_title: Modern medicine comes online: How putting Wikipedia articles through a medical journal's traditional process can put free, reliable information into as many hands as possible.

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Despite its popularity in medical circles, Wikipedia endures skepticism. Often used to gather information, it is rarely considered accurate or complete enough to guide treatment decisions In the face of this, clinicians and trainees turn to resources like UpToDate with greater frequency and confidence because in clinical medicine, a small error can make a big difference. In this issue of Open Medicine, we've published the first ever formally peer-reviewed, and edited, Wikipedia article. The clinical topic is Dengue Fever. Though there may be a need for shorter, more focused clinical articles published elsewhere as this one expands, it is anticipated that the Wikipedia page on Dengue will be a reference against which all others can be compared. Though it might be decades before we see an end to Dengue, perhaps the end to exhaustive or expensive searches about what yet needs to be done, can bring it sooner.
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paper_title: Social media, medicine and the modern journal club

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AbstractMedical media is changing along with the rest of the media landscape. One of the more interesting ways that medical media is evolving is the increased role of social media in medical media's creation, curation and distribution. Twitter, a microblogging site, has become a central hub for finding, vetting, and spreading this content among doctors. We have created a Twitter journal club for nephrology that primarily provides post-publication peer review of high impact nephrology articles, but additionally helps Twitter users build a network of engaged people with interests in academic nephrology. By following participants in the nephrology journal club, users are able to stock their personal learning network. In this essay we discuss the history of medical media, the role of Twitter in the current states of media and summarize our initial experience with a Twitter journal club.
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paper_title: Preliminary survey of leading general medicine journals’ use of Facebook and Twitter1

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Aim: This study is the first to chart the use of Facebook and Twitter by peer-reviewed medical journals. Methods: We selected the top 25 general medicine journals on the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Report (JCR) list. We surveyed their Facebook and Twitter presences and scanned their Web sites for any Facebook and (or) Twitter features as of November 2011. Results/Discussion: 20 of 25 journals had some sort of Facebook presence, with 11 also having a Twitter presence. Total ‘Likes’ across all of the Facebook pages for journals with a Facebook presence were 321,997, of which 259, 902 came from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) alone. The total numbers of Twitter ‘Followers’ were smaller by comparison when compiled across all surveyed journals. ‘Likes’ and ‘Followers’ are not the equivalents of total accesses but provide some proxy measure for impact and popularity. Those journals in our sample making best use of the open sharing nature of social media are closed-access; with the leading open access journals on the list lagging behind by comparison. We offer a partial interpretation for this and discuss other findings of our survey, provide some recommendations to journals wanting to use social media, and finally present some future research directions. Conclusions: Journals should not underestimate the potential of social media as a powerful means of reaching out to their readership.
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paper_title: Twitter as a tool for ophthalmologists

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Twitter is a social media web site created in 2006 that allows users to post Tweets, which are text-based messages containing up to 140 characters. It has grown exponentially in popularity; now more than 340 million Tweets are sent daily, and there are more than 140 million users. Twitter has become an important tool in medicine in a variety of contexts, allowing medical journals to engage their audiences, conference attendees to interact with one another in real time, and physicians to have the opportunity to interact with politicians, organizations, and the media in a manner that can be freely observed. There are also tremendous research opportunities since Twitter contains a database of public opinion that can be mined by keywords and hashtags. This article serves as an introduction to Twitter and surveys the peer-reviewed literature concerning its various uses and original studies. Opportunities for use in ophthalmology are outlined, and a recommended list of ophthalmology feeds on Twitter is presented. Overall, Twitter is an underutilized resource in ophthalmology and has the potential to enhance professional collegiality, advocacy, and scientific research.
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paper_title: Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club: A Social Media Discussion About the Age-Adjusted D-Dimer Cutoff Levels to Rule Out Pulmonary Embolism Trial

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Study objective Annals of Emergency Medicine collaborated with an educational Web site, Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM), to host an online discussion session featuring the 2014 Journal of the American Medical Association publication on the Age-Adjusted D-Dimer Cutoff Levels to Rule Out Pulmonary Embolism (ADJUST-PE) trial by Righini et al. The objective is to describe a 14-day (August 25 to September 7, 2014) worldwide academic dialogue among clinicians in regard to 4 preselected questions about the age-adjusted D-dimer cutoff to detect pulmonary embolism. Methods Five online facilitators hosted the multimodal discussion on the ALiEM Web site, Twitter, and Google Hangout. Comments across the social media platforms were curated for this report, as framed by the 4 preselected questions, and engagement was tracked through various Web analytic tools. Results Blog and Twitter comments, as well as video expert commentary involving the ADJUST-PE trial, are summarized. The dialogue resulted in 1,169 page views from 391 cities in 52 countries on the ALiEM Web site, 502,485 Twitter impressions, and 159 views of the video interview with experts. A postdiscussion summary on the Journal Jam podcast resulted in 3,962 downloads in its first week of publication during September 16 to 23, 2014. Conclusion Common themes that arose in the multimodal discussions included the heterogeneity of practices, D-dimer assays, provider knowledge about these assays, and prevalence rates in different areas of the world. This educational approach using social media technologies demonstrates a free, asynchronous means to engage a worldwide audience in scholarly discourse.
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paper_title: Increased Use of Twitter at a Medical Conference: A Report and a Review of the Educational Opportunities

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BACKGROUND ::: Most consider Twitter as a tool purely for social networking. However, it has been used extensively as a tool for online discussion at nonmedical and medical conferences, and the academic benefits of this tool have been reported. Most anesthetists still have yet to adopt this new educational tool. There is only one previously published report of the use of Twitter by anesthetists at an anesthetic conference. This paper extends that work. ::: ::: ::: OBJECTIVE ::: We report the uptake and growth in the use of Twitter, a microblogging tool, at an anesthetic conference and review the potential use of Twitter as an educational tool for anesthetists. ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: A unique Twitter hashtag (#WSM12) was created and promoted by the organizers of the Winter Scientific Meeting held by The Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI) in London in January 2012. Twitter activity was compared with Twitter activity previously reported for the AAGBI Annual Conference (September 2011 in Edinburgh). All tweets posted were categorized according to the person making the tweet and the purpose for which they were being used. The categories were determined from a literature review. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: A total of 227 tweets were posted under the #WSM12 hashtag representing a 530% increase over the previously reported anesthetic conference. Sixteen people joined the Twitter stream by using this hashtag (300% increase). Excellent agreement (κ = 0.924) was seen in the classification of tweets across the 11 categories. Delegates primarily tweeted to create and disseminate notes and learning points (55%), describe which session was attended, undertake discussions, encourage speakers, and for social reasons. In addition, the conference organizers, trade exhibitors, speakers, and anesthetists who did not attend the conference all contributed to the Twitter stream. The combined total number of followers of those who actively tweeted represented a potential audience of 3603 people. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: This report demonstrates an increase in uptake and growth in the use of Twitter at an anesthetic conference and the review illustrates the opportunities and benefits for medical education in the future.
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paper_title: Social media: A tool to spread information: A case study analysis of Twitter conversation at the Cardiac Society of Australia & New Zealand 61st Annual Scientific Meeting 2013

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Summary Background The World Wide Web has changed the way in which people communicate and consume information. More importantly, this innovation has increased the speed and spread of information. There has been recent increase in the percentage of cardiovascular professionals, including journals and associations using Twitter to engage with others and exchange ideas. Evaluating the reach and impact in scientific meetings is important in promoting the use of social media. Objective This study evaluated Twitter use during the recent 61st Annual Scientific Meeting at the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand. Methods During the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand 2013 61st Annual Scientific Meeting Symplur was used to curate conversations that were publicly posted with the hashtag #CSANZ2013. The hashtag was monitored with analysis focused on the influencers, latest tweets, tweet statistics, activity comparisons, and tweet activity during the conference. Additionally, Radian6 social media listening software was used to collect data. A summary is provided. Results There were 669 total tweets sent from 107 unique Twitter accounts during 8th August 9a.m. to 11th August 1p.m. This averaged nine tweets per hour and six tweets per participant. This assisted in the sharing of ideas and disseminating the findings and conclusions from presenters at the conference with a total 1,432,573 potential impressions in Twitter users tweet streams. Conclusion This analysis of Twitter conversations during a recent scientific meeting highlights the significance and place of social media within research dissemination and collaboration. Researchers and clinicians should consider using this technology to enhance timely communication of findings. The potential to engage with consumers and enhance shared decision-making should be explored further.
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paper_title: Monitoring Academic Conferences: Real-Time Visualization and Retrospective Analysis of Backchannel Conversations

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Social-media-supported academic conferences are becoming increasingly global as people anywhere can participate actively through backchannel conversation. It can be challenging for the conference organizers to integrate the use of social media, to take advantage of the connections between backchannel and front stage, and to encourage the participants to be a part of the broader discussion occurring through social media. The backchannel conversation during academic conference can offer key insights on best practices, and specialized tools and methods are needed to analyze this data. In this paper we present our two fold contribution to enable organizers to gain such insights. First, we introduce Conference Monitor (CM), a real time web-based tweet visualization dashboard to monitor the backchannel conversation during academic conferences. We demonstrate the features of CM, which are designed to help monitor academic conferences, and its application during the conference Theorizing the Web 2012 (TtW12). Its real time visualizations helped identify the popular sessions, the active and important participants, and trending topics. Second, we report on our retrospective analysis of the tweets about the TtW12 conference and the conference-related follower-networks. The 4828 tweets from 593 participants resulted in 8:14 tweets per participant. The 1591 new follower-relations created among the participants during the conference confirmed the overall high volume of new connections created during academic conferences. On average a speaker got more new followers than a non-speaker. A few remote participants also gained comparatively large number of new followers due to the content of their tweets and their perceived importance. There was a positive correlation between the number of new followers of a participant and the number of people who mentioned him/her. Remote participants had a significant level of participation in the backchannel and live streaming helped them to be more engaged.
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paper_title: Social media and scholarly reading

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how often university academic staff members use and create various forms of social media for their work and how that use influences their use of traditional scholarly information sources.Design/methodology/approach – This article is based on a 2011 academic reading study conducted at six higher learning institutions in the United Kingdom. Approximately 2,000 respondents completed the web‐based survey. The study used the critical incident of last reading by academics to gather information on the purpose, outcomes, and values of scholarly readings and access to library collections. In addition, academics were asked about their use and creation of social media as part of their work activities. The authors looked at six categories of social media – blogs, videos/YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, user comments in articles, podcasts, and other. This article focuses on the influence of social media on scholarly reading patterns.Findings – Most UK academics use o...
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paper_title: Identifying and analyzing researchers on twitter

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For millions of users Twitter is an important communication platform, a social network, and a system for resource sharing. Likewise, scientists use Twitter to connect with other researchers, announce calls for papers, or share their thoughts. Filtering tweets, discovering other researchers, or finding relevant information on a topic of interest, however, is difficult since no directory of researchers on Twitter exists. In this paper we present an approach to identify Twitter accounts of researchers and demonstrate its utility for the discipline of computer science. Based on a seed set of computer science conferences we collect relevant Twitter users which we can partially map to ground-truth data. The mapping is leveraged to learn a model for classifying the remaining. To gain first insights into how researchers use Twitter, we empirically analyze the identified users and compare their age, popularity, influence, and social network.
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paper_title: Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications

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Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications. We report findings from a study of the use of Web 2.0 services by UK researchers and their use in novel forms of scholarly communication. We document the contours of adoption, the barriers and enablers, and the dynamics of innovation in Web services and scholarly practices. We conclude by considering the steps that different stakeholders might take to encourage greater experimentation and uptake.
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paper_title: Social media use in the research workflow

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The paper reports on a major international survey, covering 2,000 researchers, which investigated the use of social media in the research workflow. The topic is the second to emerge from the Charleston Observatory, the research adjunct of the popular annual Charleston Conference (http://www.katina.info/conference/). The study shows that social media have found serious application at all points of the research lifecycle, from identifying research opportunities to disseminating findings at the end. The three most popular social media tools in a research setting were those for collaborative authoring, conferencing, and scheduling meetings. The most popular brands used tend to be mainstream anchor technologies or 'household brands', such as Twitter. Age is a poor predictor of social media use in a research context, and humanities and social science scholars avail themselves most of social media. Journals, conference proceedings, and edited books remain the core traditional means of disseminating research, with institutional repositories highly valued as well, but social media have become important complementary channels for disseminating and discovering research.
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paper_title: Translating Research For Health Policy: Researchers’ Perceptions And Use Of Social Media

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As the United States moves forward with health reform, the communication gap between researchers and policy makers will need to be narrowed to promote policies informed by evidence. Social media represent an expanding channel for communication. Academic journals, public health agencies, and health care organizations are increasingly using social media to communicate health information. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now regularly tweets to 290,000 followers. We conducted a survey of health policy researchers about using social media and two traditional channels (traditional media and direct outreach) to disseminate research findings to policy makers. Researchers rated the efficacy of the three dissemination methods similarly but rated social media lower than the other two in three domains: researchers’ confidence in their ability to use the method, peers’ respect for its use, and how it is perceived in academic promotion. Just 14 percent of our participants reported tweeting, ...
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paper_title: Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications

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Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications. We report findings from a study of the use of Web 2.0 services by UK researchers and their use in novel forms of scholarly communication. We document the contours of adoption, the barriers and enablers, and the dynamics of innovation in Web services and scholarly practices. We conclude by considering the steps that different stakeholders might take to encourage greater experimentation and uptake.
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paper_title: Who reads research articles? An altmetrics analysis of Mendeley user categories

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Little detailed information is known about who reads research articles and the contexts in which research articles are read. Using data about people who register in Mendeley as readers of articles, this article explores different types of users of Clinical Medicine, Engineering and Technology, Social Science, Physics, and Chemistry articles inside and outside academia. The majority of readers for all disciplines were PhD students, postgraduates, and postdocs but other types of academics were also represented. In addition, many Clinical Medicine articles were read by medical professionals. The highest correlations between citations and Mendeley readership counts were found for types of users who often authored academic articles, except for associate professors in some sub-disciplines. This suggests that Mendeley readership can reflect usage similar to traditional citation impact if the data are restricted to readers who are also authors without the delay of impact measured by citation counts. At the same time, Mendeley statistics can also reveal the hidden impact of some research articles, such as educational value for nonauthor users inside academia or the impact of research articles on practice for readers outside academia.
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paper_title: Connected scholars: Examining the role of social media in research practices of faculty using the UTAUT model

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Social media has become mainstream in recent years, and its adoption has skyrocketed. Following this trend among the general public, scholars are also increasingly adopting these tools for their professional work. The current study seeks to learn if, why and how scholars are using social media for communication and information dissemination, as well as validate and update the results of previous scholarship in this area. The study is based on the content analysis of 51 semi-structured interviews of scholars in the Information Science and Technology field. Unlike previous studies, the current work aims not only to highlight the specific social media tools used, but also discover factors that influence intention and use of social media by scholars. To achieve this, the paper uses the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), a widely adopted technology acceptance theory. This paper contributes new knowledge to methodological discussions as it is the first known study to employ UTAUT to interpret scholarly use of social media. It also offers recommendations about how UTAUT can be expanded to better fit examinations of social media use within scholarly practices.
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paper_title: Assessing the Impact of Publications Saved by Mendeley Users: Is There Any Different Pattern Among Users?

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The main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact of publications read (saved) by the different users in Mendeley in order to explore the extent to which their readership counts correlate with their citation indicators. The potential of filtering highly cited papers by Mendeley readerships and its different users have been also explored. For the analysis of the users, we have considered the information of the top three Mendeley ‘users’ reported by the Mendeley. Our results show that publications with Mendeley readerships tend to have higher citation and journal citation scores than publications without readerships. ‘Biomedical & health sciences’ and ‘Mathematics and computer science’ are the fields with respectively the most and the least readership activity in Mendeley. PhD students have the highest density of readerships per publication and Lecturers and Librarians have the lowest across all the different fields. Our precision-recall analysis indicates that in general, for publications with at least one reader in Mendeley, the capacity of readerships of filtering highly cited publications is better than (or at least as good as) Journal Citation Scores. We discuss the important limitation of Mendeley of only reporting the top three readers and not all of them in the potential development of indicators based on Mendeley and its users.
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paper_title: Presenting professorship on social media: from content and strategy to evaluation

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Technology has helped to reform class dynamics and teacher-student relationships. Although the phenomenon of online presentation has drawn considerable scholarly attention, academics seem to have an incomplete understanding about their own presentations online, especially in using social media. Without a thorough examination of how academics present themselves on social media, our understanding of the online learning environment is limited. To fill this void, this study aims to explore the following: (1) the content that college professors provide and the strategy they employ to present it on social media; and (2) how the public evaluates professors based on the content and strategy presented on social media. This study utilizes two methods. First, it conducts a content analysis of 2,783 pieces of microblog posts from 142 full-time communication professors' microblog accounts. Second, it conducts an online experiment based on a between-subject factorial design of 2 (gender: male vs. female) X 3 (topic: pe...
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paper_title: Science blogging: an exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions

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This paper presents results from three studies on science blogging, the use of blogs for science communication. A survey addresses the views and motives of science bloggers, a first content analysis examines material published in science blogging platforms, while a second content analysis looks at reader responses to controversial issues covered in science blogs. Bloggers determine to a considerable degree which communicative function their blog can realize and how accessible it will be to non-experts Frequently readers are interested in adding their views to a post, a form of involvement which is in turn welcomed by the majority of bloggers.
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paper_title: Who Tweets about Science?

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Twitter is currently one of the primary venues for online information dissemination. Although its detractors portray it as nothing more than an exercise in narcissism and banality, Twitter is also used to share news stories and other information that may be of interest to a person’s followers. The current study sampled tweeters who had tweeted at least one link to an article in one of four leading journals, with a focus on studying who, precisely, these tweeters were. The results showed that approximately 76% of the sampled accounts were maintained by individuals (rather than organizations), 67% of these accounts were maintained by a single man, and 34.4% of the individuals were identified as possessing a Ph.D, suggesting that the population of Twitter users who tweet links to academic articles does not reflect the demographics of the general public. In addition, the vast majority of students and academics were associated with some form of science, indicating that interest in scientific journals is limited to individuals in related fields of study. Conference Topic Altmetrics
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paper_title: Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications

paper_content:

Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications. We report findings from a study of the use of Web 2.0 services by UK researchers and their use in novel forms of scholarly communication. We document the contours of adoption, the barriers and enablers, and the dynamics of innovation in Web services and scholarly practices. We conclude by considering the steps that different stakeholders might take to encourage greater experimentation and uptake.
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paper_title: Examining the Medical Blogosphere: An Online Survey of Medical Bloggers

paper_content:

Background: Blogs are the major contributors to the large increase of new websites created each year. Most blogs allow readers to leave comments and, in this way, generate both conversation and encourage collaboration. Despite their popularity, however, little is known about blogs or their creators. ::: Objectives: To contribute to a better understanding of the medical blogosphere by investigating the characteristics of medical bloggers and their blogs, including bloggers’ Internet and blogging habits, their motivations for blogging, and whether or not they follow practices associated with journalism. ::: Methods: We approached 197 medical bloggers of English-language medical blogs which provided direct contact information, with posts published within the past month. The survey included 37 items designed to evaluate data about Internet and blogging habits, blog characteristics, blogging motivations, and, finally, the demographic data of bloggers. ::: Pearson’s Chi-Square test was used to assess the significance of an association between 2 categorical variables. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was utilized to reveal the relationship between participants’ ages, as well as the number of maintained blogs, and their motivation for blogging. The Mann-Whitney U test was employed to reveal relationships between practices associated with journalism and participants’ characteristics like gender and pseudonym use. ::: Results: A total of 80 (42%) of 197 eligible participants responded. The majority of responding bloggers were white (75%), highly educated (71% with a Masters degree or doctorate), male (59%), residents of the United States (72%), between the ages of 30 and 49 (58%), and working in the healthcare industry (67%). Most of them were experienced bloggers, with 23% (18/80) blogging for 4 or more years, 38% (30/80) for 2 or 3 years, 32% (26/80) for about a year, and only 7% (6/80) for 6 months or less. Those who received attention from the news media numbered 66% (53/80). When it comes to best practices associated with journalism, the participants most frequently reported including links to original source of material and spending extra time verifying facts, while rarely seeking permission to post copyrighted material. Bloggers who have published a scientific paper were more likely to quote other people or media than those who have never published such a paper (U= 506.5, n1= 41, n2= 35, P= .016). Those blogging under their real name more often included links to original sources than those writing under a pseudonym (U= 446.5, n1= 58, n2= 19, P= .01). Major motivations for blogging were sharing practical knowledge or skills with others, influencing the way others think, and expressing oneself creatively. ::: Conclusions: Medical bloggers are highly educated and devoted blog writers, faithful to their sources and readers. Sharing practical knowledge and skills, as well as influencing the way other people think, were major motivations for blogging among our medical bloggers. Medical blogs are frequently picked up by mainstream media; thus, blogs are an important vehicle to influence medical and health policy. [J Med Internet Res 2008;10(3):e28]
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paper_title: Drivers of Higher Education Institutions' Visibility: A Study of UK HEIs Social Media Use vs. Organizational Characteristics

paper_content:

Social media is increasingly used in higher education settings by researchers, students and institutions. Whether it is researchers conversing with other researchers, or universities seeking to communicate to a wider audience, social media platforms serve as a tool for users to communicate and increase visibility. Scholarly communication in social media and investigations about social media metrics is of increasing interest for scientometric researchers, and to the emergence of altmetrics. Less understood is the role of organizational characteristics in garnering social media visibility, through for instance liking and following mechanisms. In this study we aim to contribute to the understanding of the effect of specific social media use by investigating higher education institutions’ presence on Twitter. We investigate the possible connections between followers on Twitter and the use of Twitter and the organizational characteristics of the HEIs. We find that HEIs’ social media visibility on Twitter are only partly explained by social media use and that organizational characteristics also play a role in garnering these followers. Although, there is an advantage in garnering followers for those first adopters of Twitter. These findings emphasize the importance of considering a range of factors to understand impact online for organizations and HEIs in particular.
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paper_title: Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information

paper_content:

The research blog has become a popular mechanism for the quick discussion of scholarly information. However, unlike peer-reviewed journals, the characteristics of this form of scientific discourse are not well understood, for example in terms of the spread of blogger levels of education, gender and institutional affiliations. In this paper we fill this gap by analyzing a sample of blog posts discussing science via an aggregator called ResearchBlogging.org (RB). ResearchBlogging.org aggregates posts based on peer-reviewed research and allows bloggers to cite their sources in a scholarly manner. We studied the bloggers, blog posts and referenced journals of bloggers who posted at least 20 items. We found that RB bloggers show a preference for papers from high-impact journals and blog mostly about research in the life and behavioral sciences. The most frequently referenced journal sources in the sample were: Science, Nature, PNAS and PLoS One. Most of the bloggers in our sample had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs, and at least 90% of these accounts connect to at least one other RB-related Twitter account. The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.
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paper_title: Discovering value in academic social networks: A case study in ResearchGate

paper_content:

The research presented in this paper is about detecting collaborative networks inside the structure of a research social network. As case study we consider ResearchGate and SEE University academic staff. First we describe the methodology used to crawl and create an academic-academic network depending from their fields of interest. We then calculate and discuss four social network analysis centrality measures (closeness, betweenness, degree, and PageRank) for entities in this network. In addition to these metrics, we have also investigated grouping of individuals, based on automatic clustering depending from their reciprocal relationships.
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paper_title: Social media and scholarly reading

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how often university academic staff members use and create various forms of social media for their work and how that use influences their use of traditional scholarly information sources.Design/methodology/approach – This article is based on a 2011 academic reading study conducted at six higher learning institutions in the United Kingdom. Approximately 2,000 respondents completed the web‐based survey. The study used the critical incident of last reading by academics to gather information on the purpose, outcomes, and values of scholarly readings and access to library collections. In addition, academics were asked about their use and creation of social media as part of their work activities. The authors looked at six categories of social media – blogs, videos/YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, user comments in articles, podcasts, and other. This article focuses on the influence of social media on scholarly reading patterns.Findings – Most UK academics use o...
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paper_title: Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication

paper_content:

This paper investigates disciplinary differences in how researchers use the microblogging site Twitter. Tweets from selected researchers in ten disciplines (astrophysics, biochemistry, digital humanities, economics, history of science, cheminformatics, cognitive science, drug discovery, social network analysis, and sociology) were collected and analyzed both statistically and qualitatively. The researchers tended to share more links and retweet more than the average Twitter users in earlier research and there were clear disciplinary differences in how they used Twitter. Biochemists retweeted substantially more than researchers in the other disciplines. Researchers in digital humanities and cognitive science used Twitter more for conversations, while researchers in economics shared the most links. Finally, whilst researchers in biochemistry, astrophysics, cheminformatics and digital humanities seemed to use Twitter for scholarly communication, scientific use of Twitter in economics, sociology and history of science appeared to be marginal.
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paper_title: Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications

paper_content:

Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications. We report findings from a study of the use of Web 2.0 services by UK researchers and their use in novel forms of scholarly communication. We document the contours of adoption, the barriers and enablers, and the dynamics of innovation in Web services and scholarly practices. We conclude by considering the steps that different stakeholders might take to encourage greater experimentation and uptake.
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paper_title: Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0

paper_content:

Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process. It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications. Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.
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paper_title: Who reads research articles? An altmetrics analysis of Mendeley user categories

paper_content:

Little detailed information is known about who reads research articles and the contexts in which research articles are read. Using data about people who register in Mendeley as readers of articles, this article explores different types of users of Clinical Medicine, Engineering and Technology, Social Science, Physics, and Chemistry articles inside and outside academia. The majority of readers for all disciplines were PhD students, postgraduates, and postdocs but other types of academics were also represented. In addition, many Clinical Medicine articles were read by medical professionals. The highest correlations between citations and Mendeley readership counts were found for types of users who often authored academic articles, except for associate professors in some sub-disciplines. This suggests that Mendeley readership can reflect usage similar to traditional citation impact if the data are restricted to readers who are also authors without the delay of impact measured by citation counts. At the same time, Mendeley statistics can also reveal the hidden impact of some research articles, such as educational value for nonauthor users inside academia or the impact of research articles on practice for readers outside academia.
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paper_title: Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities: Research evaluation and knowledge flows 1

paper_content:

Although there is evidence that counting the readers of an article in the social reference site, Mendeley, may help to capture its research impact, the extent to which this is true for different scientific fields is unknown. In this study, we compare Mendeley readership counts with citations for different social sciences and humanities disciplines. The overall correlation between Mendeley readership counts and citations for the social sciences was higher than for the humanities. Low and medium correlations between Mendeley bookmarks and citation counts in all the investigated disciplines suggest that these measures reflect different aspects of research impact. Mendeley data were also used to discover patterns of information flow between scientific fields. Comparing information flows based on Mendeley bookmarking data and cross-disciplinary citation analysis for the disciplines revealed substantial similarities and some differences. Thus, the evidence from this study suggests that Mendeley readership data could be used to help capture knowledge transfer across scientific disciplines, especially for people that read but do not author articles, as well as giving impact evidence at an earlier stage than is possible with citation counts.
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paper_title: Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0

paper_content:

Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process. It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications. Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.
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paper_title: Geographic variation in social media metrics: an analysis of Latin American journal articles

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how the potential of altmetrics varies around the world by measuring the percentage of articles with non-zero metrics (coverage) for articles published from a developing region (Latin America). Design/methodology/approach – This study uses article metadata from a prominent Latin American journal portal, SciELO, and combines it with altmetrics data from Altmetric.com and with data collected by author-written scripts. The study is primarily descriptive, focusing on coverage levels disaggregated by year, country, subject area, and language. Findings – Coverage levels for most of the social media sources studied was zero or negligible. Only three metrics had coverage levels above 2 per cent – Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook. Of these, Twitter showed the most significant differences with previous studies. Mendeley coverage levels reach those found by previous studies, but it takes up to two years longer for articles to be saved in the...
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paper_title: Exploring altmetrics in an emerging country context

paper_content:

The study of altmetrics is relatively new, and the little that is known about altmetrics is only known for journals and articles from a limited set of contexts (publication venues and subject areas). The use of PLOS, arXiv.org, PubMed, Web of Science, or of a few well-established journals like Nature and Science introduces a selection bias that calls into question the generalizability of reported results. For example, we already know that altmetrics related to mentions in blogs are heavily influenced by the makeup of bloggers themselves and the journals they tend to blog about, both of which introduce a strong bias in favour high-impact life science journals (Shema et al., 2012). There is therefore a need to study the altmetrics of journals and articles published and read in other contexts, including research that is published and read in regions of the world beyond the global North, as well as in other languages beyond English.
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paper_title: The metric tide: report of the independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management

paper_content:

This report presents the findings and recommendations of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. The review was chaired by Professor James Wilsdon, supported by an independent and multidisciplinary group of experts in scientometrics, research funding, research policy, publishing, university management and administration. ::: ::: This review has gone beyond earlier studies to take a deeper look at potential uses and limitations of research metrics and indicators. It has explored the use of metrics across different disciplines, and assessed their potential contribution to the development of research excellence and impact. It has analysed their role in processes of research assessment, including the next cycle of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It has considered the changing ways in which universities are using quantitative indicators in their management systems, and the growing power of league tables and rankings. And it has considered the negative or unintended effects of metrics on various aspects of research culture. ::: ::: The report starts by tracing the history of metrics in research management and assessment, in the UK and internationally. It looks at the applicability of metrics within different research cultures, compares the peer review system with metric-based alternatives, and considers what balance might be struck between the two. It charts the development of research management systems within institutions, and examines the effects of the growing use of quantitative indicators on different aspects of research culture, including performance management, equality, diversity, interdisciplinarity, and the ‘gaming’ of assessment systems. The review looks at how different funders are using quantitative indicators, and considers their potential role in research and innovation policy. Finally, it examines the role that metrics played in REF2014, and outlines scenarios for their contribution to future exercises.
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paper_title: Academic sell-out: How an obsession with metrics and rankings is damaging academia

paper_content:

Increasingly, academics have to demonstrate that their research has academic ::: impact. Universities normally use journal rankings and journal impact factors ::: to assess the research impact of individual academics. More recently, ::: citation counts for individual articles and the h-index have also been used ::: to measure the academic impact of academics. There are, however, several ::: serious problems with relying on journal rankings, journal impact factors and ::: citation counts. For example, articles without any impact may be published in ::: highly ranked journals or journals with high impact factor, whereas articles ::: with high impact could be published in lower ranked journals or journals with ::: low impact factor. Citation counts can also be easily gamed and manipulated ::: and the h-index disadvantages early career academics. This paper discusses ::: these and several other problems and suggests alternatives such as ::: post-publication peer review and open-access journals.
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paper_title: The Altmetrics Collection

paper_content:

What paper should I read next? Who should I talk to at a conference? Which research group should get this grant? Researchers and funders alike must make daily judgments on how to best spend their limited time and money–judgments that are becoming increasingly difficult as the volume of scholarly communication increases. Not only does the number of scholarly papers continue to grow, it is joined by new forms of communication from data publications to microblog posts. ::: ::: To deal with incoming information, scholars have always relied upon filters. At first these filters were manually compiled compendia and corpora of the literature. But by the mid-20th century, filters built on manual indexing began to break under the weight of booming postwar science production. Garfield [1] and others pioneered a solution: automated filters that leveraged scientists own impact judgments, aggregating citations as “pellets of peer recognition.” [2]. ::: ::: These citation-based filters have dramatically grown in importance and have become the tenet of how research impact is measured. But, like manual indexing 60 years ago, they may today be failing to keep up with the literature’s growing volume, velocity, and diversity [3]. ::: ::: Citations are heavily gamed [4]–[6] and are painfully slow to accumulate [7], and overlook increasingly important societal and clinical impacts [8]. Most importantly, they overlook new scholarly forms like datasets, software, and research blogs that fall outside of the scope of citable research objects. In sum, citations only reflect formal acknowledgment and thus they provide only a partial picture of the science system [9]. Scholars may discuss, annotate, recommend, refute, comment, read, and teach a new finding before it ever appears in the formal citation registry. We need new mechanisms to create a subtler, higher-resolution picture of the science system. ::: ::: The Quest for Better Filters ::: The scientometrics community has not been blind to the limitations of citation measures, and has collectively proposed methods to gather evidence of broader impacts and provide more detail about the science system: tracking acknowledgements [10], patents [11], mentorships [12], news articles [8], usage in syllabuses [13], and many others, separately and in various combinations [14]. The emergence of the Web, a “nutrient-rich space for scholars” [15], has held particular promise for new filters and lenses on scholarly output. Webometrics researchers have uncovered evidence of informal impact by examining networks of hyperlinks and mentions on the broader Web [16]–[18]. An important strand of webometrics has also examined the properties of article download data [7], [19], [20]. ::: ::: The last several years, however, have presented a promising new approach to gathering fine-grained impact data: tracking large-scale activity around scholarly products in online tools and environments. These tools and environments include, among others: ::: ::: ::: social media like Twitter and Facebook ::: ::: ::: online reference managers like CiteULike, Zotero, and Mendeley ::: ::: ::: collaborative encyclopedias like Wikipedia ::: ::: ::: blogs, both scholarly and general-audience ::: ::: ::: scholarly social networks, like ResearchGate or Academia.edu ::: ::: ::: conference organization sites like Lanyrd.com ::: ::: ::: ::: Growing numbers of scholars are using these and similar tools to mediate their interaction with the literature. In doing so, they are leaving valuable tracks behind them–tracks with potential to show informal paths of influence with unprecedented speed and resolution. Many of these tools offer open APIs, supporting large-scale, automated mining of online activities and conversations around research objects [21]. ::: ::: Altmetrics [22], [23] is the study and use of scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments. The term has also been used to describe the metrics themselves–one could propose in plural a “set of new altmetrics.” Altmetrics is in most cases a subset of both scientometrics and webometrics; it is a subset of the latter in that it focuses more narrowly on scholarly influence as measured in online tools and environments, rather than on the Web more generally. ::: ::: Altmetrics may support finer-grained maps of science, broader and more equitable evaluations, and improvements to the peer-review system [24]. On the other hand, the use and development of altmetrics should be pursued with appropriate scientific caution. Altmetrics may face attempts at manipulation similar to what Google must deal with in web search ranking. Addressing such manipulation may, in-turn, impact the transparency of altmetrics. New and complex measures may distort our picture of the science system if not rigorously assessed and correctly understood. Finally, altmetrics may promote an evaluation system for scholarship that many argue has become overly focused on metrics.
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paper_title: What Can Article-Level Metrics Do for You?

paper_content:

Article-level metrics (ALMs) provide a wide range of metrics about the uptake of an individual journal article by the scientific community after publication. They include citations, usage statistics, discussions in online comments and social media, social bookmarking, and recommendations. In this essay, we describe 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.
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paper_title: A multi-metric approach for research evaluation

paper_content:

Background information is provided about the Web 2.0 related term altmetrics. This term is placed in the context of the broader field of informetrics. The term influmetrics is proposed as a better term for altmetrics. The importance of considering research products and not just scientific publications is highlighted. Issues related to peer review and making funding decisions within a multi-metric approach are discussed and brought in relation with the new metrics field.
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paper_title: Ask not what altmetrics can do for you, but what altmetrics can do for developing countries

paper_content:

Editor's Summary ::: ::: ::: ::: Traditional citation counting for evaluating scholarly impact unfairly benefits those in North America and Europe and shortchanges the alternative scholars of the developing world. Alternative metrics more accurately measure the impact of scholarly writings, better serve all scholars and can foster a research culture that supports national development goals. The current system favors dominant journals and topics of interest to the prevailing scientific community, captured by the leading bibliographic databases. Yet publishing on platforms more open to underrepresented journals and scholars in developing nations would promote a greater range of ideas and scholarly exchange. With facilitating international development in mind, scholarly communication should encourage research on topics of local and national relevance and be presented through globally accessible channels, disseminated by social media. Publishing technology barriers to participation must be lowered. The value of altmetrics will be evident, providing advantages to alternative scholars, serving public needs and revealing scientific contributions long underrepresented in the standard literature.
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paper_title: Tweeting biomedicine: an analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature

paper_content:

Data collected by social media platforms have been introduced as new sources for indicators to help measure the impact of scholarly research in ways that are complementary to traditional citation analysis. Data generated from social media activities can be used to reflect broad types of impact. This article aims to provide systematic evidence about how often Twitter is used to disseminate information about journal articles in the biomedical sciences. The analysis is based on 1.4 million documents covered by both PubMed and Web of Science and published between 2010 and 2012. The number of tweets containing links to these documents was analyzed and compared to citations to evaluate the degree to which certain journals, disciplines, and specialties were represented on Twitter and how far tweets correlate with citation impact. With less than 10% of PubMed articles mentioned on Twitter, its uptake is low in general but differs between journals and specialties. Correlations between tweets and citations are low, implying that impact metrics based on tweets are different from those based on citations. A framework using the coverage of articles and the correlation between Twitter mentions and citations is proposed to facilitate the evaluation of novel social-media-based metrics.
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paper_title: Who Tweets about Science?

paper_content:

Twitter is currently one of the primary venues for online information dissemination. Although its detractors portray it as nothing more than an exercise in narcissism and banality, Twitter is also used to share news stories and other information that may be of interest to a person’s followers. The current study sampled tweeters who had tweeted at least one link to an article in one of four leading journals, with a focus on studying who, precisely, these tweeters were. The results showed that approximately 76% of the sampled accounts were maintained by individuals (rather than organizations), 67% of these accounts were maintained by a single man, and 34.4% of the individuals were identified as possessing a Ph.D, suggesting that the population of Twitter users who tweet links to academic articles does not reflect the demographics of the general public. In addition, the vast majority of students and academics were associated with some form of science, indicating that interest in scientific journals is limited to individuals in related fields of study. Conference Topic Altmetrics
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paper_title: How consistent are altmetrics providers? Study of 1000 PLOS ONE publications using the PLOS ALM, Mendeley and Altmetric.com APIs

paper_content:

Introduction Altmetrics track the impact of scholarly works on the social web. The term was introduced in 2010 (Priem, et al.) as an alternative way of measuring the broader research impact of scholarly outputs using the social web; aimed at enhancing and complementing the more traditional ways of impact assessment via citations. The initial phase of altmetrics has been characterized by the development of diversity of tools that aim to track ‘real-time’ impact of scientific outputs (Wouters & Costas, 2012). Several studies have started to analyze the presence of altmetrics across scientific publications (Priem, Piwowar, & Hemminger, 2012; Zahedi, Costas & Wouters, 2014; Costas, Zahedi, & Wouters, 2014; Thelwall et al., 2013). However, little is still known about the quality of altmetric data obtained by these providers. It seems that similar metrics differ across different providers due to the difference in collection time, data sources and methods of collection among altmetrics providers (Chamberlain, 2013). Hence, the assessment of the quality, reliability and consistency of altmetric data is crucial in order to be able to introduce altmetrics for research assessment purposes. This study targets to investigate 3 main altmetrics providers (PLOS ALM, Altmetric.com and Mendeley) and to test the accuracy and quality of their metrics for a same set of publications. The research questions are as follows: 1. Are there differences across these three altmetrics providers in the metrics for the same set of publications? 2. If there are differences, what are possible factors that explain these differences? Data and Methodology This study is based on all PLOS ONE publications from 2013 (31,408 articles), retrieved from the full PLOS ALM Dataset on 14 Jan 2014. A random sample of 1,000 publications from this data set has been extracted. DOIs were used for collecting the metrics automatically from three providers of altmetrics data: PLOS ALM, Altmetric.com and Mendeley using their REST APIs. The data collection was performed at the same date and time (11 AM CET on February 11, 2014). The R statistical analysis software version 3.0.2 and the rOpenSci alm package were used to obtain the data from the PLOS ALM REST API v3, and to generate a CSV report. For gathering the altmetric data from the Mendeley and Altmetric.com, the responses provided on search requests using DOI’s were downloaded per API search request separately in Java Script Object Notations (JSON) format on the basis of individual DOIs and parsed by using the additional JAVA library from within the SAS software. Finally, the data transformed into a comma separated value format (CSV) and imported in SQL in order to join the files from the three altmetrics providers and to perform further analysis. Results Coverage of PLOS ONE publications across altmetrics providers Table 1 shows the coverage of the 1000 PLOS ONE publications by these altmetrics providers. We have focused only on 3 altmetric indicators: Mendeley readerships, Twitter counts and Facebook counts. The number of publications with at least one metric (Mendeley readers, tweet and Facebook counts) show that Mendeley has the highest coverage, followed by PLOS ALM and Altmetric.com. There are more publications with at least one tweet in Altmetric.com vs. PLOS ALM and the other way around for Facebook counts (PLOS ALM has a higher coverage than Altmetric.com). Table 1. coverage of PLOS ONE publications by altmetrics providers
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paper_title: Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0

paper_content:

Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process. It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications. Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.
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paper_title: Drivers of Higher Education Institutions' Visibility: A Study of UK HEIs Social Media Use vs. Organizational Characteristics

paper_content:

Social media is increasingly used in higher education settings by researchers, students and institutions. Whether it is researchers conversing with other researchers, or universities seeking to communicate to a wider audience, social media platforms serve as a tool for users to communicate and increase visibility. Scholarly communication in social media and investigations about social media metrics is of increasing interest for scientometric researchers, and to the emergence of altmetrics. Less understood is the role of organizational characteristics in garnering social media visibility, through for instance liking and following mechanisms. In this study we aim to contribute to the understanding of the effect of specific social media use by investigating higher education institutions’ presence on Twitter. We investigate the possible connections between followers on Twitter and the use of Twitter and the organizational characteristics of the HEIs. We find that HEIs’ social media visibility on Twitter are only partly explained by social media use and that organizational characteristics also play a role in garnering these followers. Although, there is an advantage in garnering followers for those first adopters of Twitter. These findings emphasize the importance of considering a range of factors to understand impact online for organizations and HEIs in particular.
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paper_title: Altmetrics for large, multidisciplinary research groups: Comparison of current tools

paper_content:

Most altmetric studies compare how often a publication has been cited or mentioned on the Web. Yet, a closer look at altmetric analyses reveals that the altmetric tools employed and the social media platforms considered may have a significant effect on the available information and ensuing interpretation. Therefore, it is indicated to investigate and compare the various tools currently available for altmetric analyses and the social media platforms they draw upon. This paper will present results from a comparative altmetric analysis conducted employing four well-established altmetric services based on a broad, multidisciplinary sample of scientific publications. Our study reveals that for several data sources the coverage of findable publications on social media platforms and metric counts (impact) can vary across altmetric data providers. ::: ::: http://www.bibliometrie-pf.de/article/viewFile/205/258
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paper_title: Five challenges in altmetrics: A toolmaker's perspective

paper_content:

Jean Liu is data curator and blog editor at Altmetric LLP, and Euan Adie is the founder. They can be reached at http://altmetric.com. D riven by the development of new tools for measuring scholarly attention, altmetrics constitute a burgeoning new area of information science. It is an exciting time to be involved in the field since there are so many opportunities to contribute in innovative ways. We develop altmetrics tools and related services at Altmetric LLP, a small London-based start-up founded in 2011 [1]. Like all developers of new altmetrics tools, we frequently encounter challenges in defining what should be measured, accurately collecting attention from disparate sources and making sense of the huge amount of compiled data. We outline five of these challenges in this piece, illustrating them with examples from our experience. It is worth noting that the altmetrics community as a whole comes together regularly to discuss these and other issues, with two open workshops held in 2012 and more planned for the future.
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paper_title: The metric tide: report of the independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management

paper_content:

This report presents the findings and recommendations of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. The review was chaired by Professor James Wilsdon, supported by an independent and multidisciplinary group of experts in scientometrics, research funding, research policy, publishing, university management and administration. ::: ::: This review has gone beyond earlier studies to take a deeper look at potential uses and limitations of research metrics and indicators. It has explored the use of metrics across different disciplines, and assessed their potential contribution to the development of research excellence and impact. It has analysed their role in processes of research assessment, including the next cycle of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It has considered the changing ways in which universities are using quantitative indicators in their management systems, and the growing power of league tables and rankings. And it has considered the negative or unintended effects of metrics on various aspects of research culture. ::: ::: The report starts by tracing the history of metrics in research management and assessment, in the UK and internationally. It looks at the applicability of metrics within different research cultures, compares the peer review system with metric-based alternatives, and considers what balance might be struck between the two. It charts the development of research management systems within institutions, and examines the effects of the growing use of quantitative indicators on different aspects of research culture, including performance management, equality, diversity, interdisciplinarity, and the ‘gaming’ of assessment systems. The review looks at how different funders are using quantitative indicators, and considers their potential role in research and innovation policy. Finally, it examines the role that metrics played in REF2014, and outlines scenarios for their contribution to future exercises.
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paper_title: Tweets as impact indicators: Examining the implications of automated bot accounts on Twitter

paper_content:

This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific articles deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the perspective of social media metrics altmetrics, where mentions of scholarly documents on Twitter have been suggested as a means of measuring impact that is both broader and timelier than citations. Our results show that automated Twitter accounts create a considerable amount of tweets to scientific articles and that they behave differently than common social bots, which has critical implications for the use of raw tweet counts in research evaluation and assessment. We discuss some definitions of Twitter cyborgs and bots in scholarly communication and propose distinguishing between different levels of engagement-that is, differentiating between tweeting only bibliographic information to discussing or commenting on the content of a scientific work.
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paper_title: Altmetrics: New Indicators for Scientific Communication in Web 2.0

paper_content:

In this paper we review the socalled altmetrics or alternative metrics. This concept raises from the development of new indicators based on Web 2.0, for the evaluation of the research and academic activity. The basic assumption is that variables such as mentions in blogs, number of twits or of researchers bookmarking a research paper for instance, may be legitimate indicators for measuring the use and impact of scientific publications. In this sense, these indicators are currently the focus of the bibliometric community and are being discussed and debated. We describe the main platforms and indicators and we analyze as a sample the Spanish research output in Communication Studies. Comparing traditional indicators such as citations with these new indicators. The results show that the most cited papers are also the ones with a highest impact according to the altmetrics. We conclude pointing out the main shortcomings these metrics present and the role they may play when measuring the research impact through 2.0 platforms.
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paper_title: Assessing the Impact of Publications Saved by Mendeley Users: Is There Any Different Pattern Among Users?

paper_content:

The main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact of publications read (saved) by the different users in Mendeley in order to explore the extent to which their readership counts correlate with their citation indicators. The potential of filtering highly cited papers by Mendeley readerships and its different users have been also explored. For the analysis of the users, we have considered the information of the top three Mendeley ‘users’ reported by the Mendeley. Our results show that publications with Mendeley readerships tend to have higher citation and journal citation scores than publications without readerships. ‘Biomedical & health sciences’ and ‘Mathematics and computer science’ are the fields with respectively the most and the least readership activity in Mendeley. PhD students have the highest density of readerships per publication and Lecturers and Librarians have the lowest across all the different fields. Our precision-recall analysis indicates that in general, for publications with at least one reader in Mendeley, the capacity of readerships of filtering highly cited publications is better than (or at least as good as) Journal Citation Scores. We discuss the important limitation of Mendeley of only reporting the top three readers and not all of them in the potential development of indicators based on Mendeley and its users.
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paper_title: Altmetrics – a complement to conventional metrics

paper_content:

Emerging metrics based on article-level does not exclude traditional metrics based on citations to the journal, but complements them. Both can be employed in conjunction to offer a richer picture of an article use from immediate to long terms. Article-level metrics (ALM) is the result of the aggregation of different data sources and the collection of content from multiple social network services. Sources used for the aggregation can be broken down into five categories: usage, captures, mentions, social media and citations. Data sources depend on the tool, but they include classic metrics indicators based on citations, academic social networks (Mendeley, CiteULike, Delicious) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or Youtube, among others). Altmetrics is not synonymous with alternative metrics. Altmetrics are normally early available and allow to assess the social impact of scholarly outputs, almost at the real time. This paper overviews briefly the meaning of altmetrics and describes some of the existing tools used to apply this new metrics: Public Library of Science - Article-Level Metrics, Altmetric, Impactstory and Plum.
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paper_title: Altmetrics: Rethinking the Way We Measure

paper_content:

Altmetrics is the focus for this edition of “Balance Point.” The column editor invited Finbar Galligan who has gained considerable knowledge of altmetrics to co-author the column. Altmetrics, their relationship to traditional metrics, their importance, uses, potential impacts, and possible future directions are examined. The authors conclude that altmetrics have an important future role to play and that they offer the potential to revolutionize the analysis of the value and impact of scholarly work.
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paper_title: Do altmetrics follow the crowd or does the crowd follow altmetrics?

paper_content:

Changes are occurring in scholarly communication as scientific discourse and research activities spread across various social media platforms. In this paper, we study altmetrics on the article and journal levels, investigating whether the online attention received by research articles is related to scholarly impact or may be due to other factors. We define a new metric, Journal Social Impact (JSI), based on eleven data sources: CiteULike, Mendeley, F1000, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mainstream news outlets, Google Plus, Pinterest, Reddit, and sites running Stack Exchange (Q&A). We compare JSI against diverse citation-based metrics, and find that JSI significantly correlates with a number of them. These findings indicate that online attention of scholarly articles is related to traditional journal rankings and favors journals with a longer history of scholarly impact. We also find that journal-level altmetrics have strong significant correlations among themselves, compared with the weak correlations among article-level altmetrics. Another finding is that Mendeley and Twitter have the highest usage and coverage of scholarly activities. Among individual altmetrics, we find that the readership of academic social networks have the highest correlations with citation-based metrics. Our findings deepen the overall understanding of altmetrics and can assist in validating them.
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paper_title: Relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators across academic social sites: The case of CSIC's members

paper_content:

This study explores the connections between social and usage metrics (altmetrics) and bibliometric indicators at the author level. It studies to what extent these indicators, gained from academic sites, can provide a proxy for research impact. Close to 10,000 author profiles belonging to the Spanish National Research Council were extracted from the principal scholarly social sites: ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Mendeley and academic search engines: Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar Citations. Results describe little overlapping between sites because most of the researchers only manage one profile (72%). Correlations point out that there is scant relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators at author level. This is due to the almetric ones are site-dependent, while the bibliometric ones are more stable across web sites. It is concluded that altmetrics could reflect an alternative dimension of the research performance, close, perhaps, to science popularization and networking abilities, but far from citation impact.
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paper_title: Geographic variation in social media metrics: an analysis of Latin American journal articles

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how the potential of altmetrics varies around the world by measuring the percentage of articles with non-zero metrics (coverage) for articles published from a developing region (Latin America). Design/methodology/approach – This study uses article metadata from a prominent Latin American journal portal, SciELO, and combines it with altmetrics data from Altmetric.com and with data collected by author-written scripts. The study is primarily descriptive, focusing on coverage levels disaggregated by year, country, subject area, and language. Findings – Coverage levels for most of the social media sources studied was zero or negligible. Only three metrics had coverage levels above 2 per cent – Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook. Of these, Twitter showed the most significant differences with previous studies. Mendeley coverage levels reach those found by previous studies, but it takes up to two years longer for articles to be saved in the...
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paper_title: What does Twitter Measure?: Influence of Diverse User Groups in Altmetrics

paper_content:

The most important goal for digital libraries is to ensure high quality search experience for all kinds of users. To attain this goal, it is necessary to have as much relevant metadata as possible at hand to assess the quality of publications. Recently, a new group of metrics appeared, that has the potential to raise the quality of publication metadata to the next level -- the altmetrics. These metrics try to reflect the impact of publications within the social web. However, currently it is still unclear if and how altmetrics should be used to assess the quality of a publication and how altmetrics are related to classical bibliographical metrics (like e.g. citations). To gain more insights about what kind of concepts are reflected by altmetrics, we conducted an in-depth analysis on a real world dataset crawled from the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Especially, we analyzed if the common approach to regard the users in the social web as one homogeneous group is sensible or if users need to be divided into diverse groups in order to receive meaningful results.
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paper_title: Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

paper_content:

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics", sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. ::: We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone. There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact "flavors", capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.
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paper_title: Evaluating altmetrics

paper_content:

The rise of the social web and its uptake by scholars has led to the creation of altmetrics, which are social web metrics for academic publications. These new metrics can, in theory, be used in an evaluative role, to give early estimates of the impact of publications or to give estimates of non-traditional types of impact. They can also be used as an information seeking aid: to help draw a digital library user's attention to papers that have attracted social web mentions. If altmetrics are to be trusted then they must be evaluated to see if the claims made about them are reasonable. Drawing upon previous citation analysis debates and web citation analysis research, this article discusses altmetric evaluation strategies, including correlation tests, content analyses, interviews and pragmatic analyses. It recommends that a range of methods are needed for altmetric evaluations, that the methods should focus on identifying the relative strengths of influences on altmetric creation, and that such evaluations should be prioritised in a logical order.
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paper_title: Using altmetrics for assessing research impact in the humanities

paper_content:

The prospects of altmetrics are especially encouraging for research fields in the humanities that currently are difficult to study using established bibliometric methods. Yet, little is known about the altmetric impact of research fields in the humanities. Consequently, this paper analyses the altmetric coverage and impact of humanities-oriented articles and books published by Swedish universities during 2012. Some of the most common altmetric sources are examined using a sample of 310 journal articles and 54 books. Mendeley has the highest coverage of journal articles (61 %) followed by Twitter (21 %) while very few of the publications are mentioned in blogs or on Facebook. Books, on the other hand, are quite often tweeted while both Mendeley's and the novel data source Library Thing's coverage is low. Many of the problems of applying bibliometrics to the humanities are also relevant for altmetric approaches; the importance of non-journal publications, the reliance on print as well the limited coverage of non-English language publications. However, the continuing development and diversification of methods suggests that altmetrics could evolve into a valuable tool for assessing research in the humanities.
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paper_title: Astrophysics publications on arXiv, Scopus and Mendeley: a case study

paper_content:

In this study we examined a sample of 100 European astrophysicists and their publications indexed by the citation database Scopus, submitted to the arXiv repository and bookmarked by readers in the reference manager Mendeley. Although it is believed that astrophysicists use arXiv widely and extensively, the results show that on average more items are indexed by Scopus than submitted to arXiv. A considerable proportion of the items indexed by Scopus appear also on Mendeley, but on average the number of readers who bookmarked the item on Mendeley is much lower than the number of citations reported in Scopus. The comparisons between the data sources were done based on the authors and the titles of the publications.
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paper_title: Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement

paper_content:

This paper investigates whether CiteULike and Mendeley are useful for measuring scholarly influence, using a sample of 1,613 papers published in Nature and Science in 2007. Traditional citation counts from the Web of Science (WoS) were used as benchmarks to compare with the number of users who bookmarked the articles in one of the two free online reference manager sites. Statistically significant correlations were found between the user counts and the corresponding WoS citation counts, suggesting that this type of influence is related in some way to traditional citation-based scholarly impact but the number of users of these systems seems to be still too small for them to challenge traditional citation indexes.
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paper_title: Applying social bookmarking data to evaluate journal usage

paper_content:

Web 2.0 technologies are finding their way into academics: specialized social bookmarking services allow researchers to store and share scientific literature online. By bookmarking and tagging articles, academic prosumers generate new information about resources, i.e. usage statistics and content description of scientific journals. Given the lack of global download statistics, the authors propose the application of social bookmarking data to journal evaluation. For a set of 45 physics journals all 13,608 bookmarks from CiteULike, Connotea and BibSonomy to documents published between 2004 and 2008 were analyzed. This article explores bookmarking data in STM and examines in how far it can be used to describe the perception of periodicals by the readership. Four basic indicators are defined, which analyze different aspects of usage: Usage Ratio, Usage Diffusion, Article Usage Intensity and Journal Usage Intensity. Tags are analyzed to describe a reader-specific view on journal content.
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paper_title: Visualizing readership activity of Mendeley users using VOSviewer

paper_content:

Introduction: Mendeley is a popular reference manager and academic social network that helps users to organize their publications and collaborate with others online. For each publication that is included in Mendeley, a variety of readership statistics are collected. Therefore, besides being a useful tool, Mendeley has also become an interesting and rich altmetrics data source (Zahedi, Costas & Wouters, 2014). This paper builds on a pervious study of Zahedi, Costas & Wouters (2013) in which a sample of 200,000 publications was used to study the readership activity of Mendeley users based on their career stages across seven broad disciplines of science. In this paper, our aim is to analyze the readership activity of Mendeley users at a more detailed level. Based on all 2011 publications that are included in the Web of Science (WoS) database and the readership statistics that can be collected from Mendeley, we try to answer the following research questions: 1. What are the differences in readership activity across research fields? In which fields are Mendeley users most and least active? What are the topics of interest within research fields? 2. What are the fields of interest of the users in different career stages (i.e. Student, PhDs, PostDocs, Researchers, Professors, Librarians, Lecturers & other Professionals)? Are there any differences between types of users? Data & Methodology: For this study, we collected all publications from the WoS database that are classified as article or review, that were published in 2011, and for which a DOI is available. In total, we ended up with 1,114,776 publications. The DOIs of the collected publications were used to extract the readership statistics of these publications from Mendeley by using the Mendeley REST API in November 2013. Out of the 1,114,776 publications, a total of 847,587 publications (76%) were saved in Mendeley. The data from Mendeley was matched with the in-house WoS database of CWTS in order to add citation data. For each publication, citations were counted until the end of 2013. The VOSviewer software tool (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010) was used to create so-called overlay visualizations. These visualizations can be used to show additional information on top of a base map (e.g. Van Eck et. al., 2013; Leydesdorff & Rafols, 2012). Two types of base maps were used. A base map containing the 250 subject categories in the WoS database was used to analyze differences in readership activity across research fields and to analyze differences in interest between types of users. Base maps containing terms extracted from titles and abstracts using the text mining functionality of VOSviewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2011) were used to analyze differences in readership activity within research fields.
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paper_title: Mendeley readership altmetrics for medical articles: An analysis of 45 fields

paper_content:

Medical research is highly funded and often expensive and so is particularly important to evaluate effectively. Nevertheless, citation counts may accrue too slowly for use in some formal and informal evaluations. It is therefore important to investigate whether alternative metrics could be used as substitutes. This article assesses whether one such altmetric, Mendeley readership counts, correlates strongly with citation counts across all medical fields, whether the relationship is stronger if student readers are excluded, and whether they are distributed similarly to citation counts. Based on a sample of 332,975 articles from 2009 in 45 medical fields in Scopus, citation counts correlated strongly about 0.7; 78% of articles had at least one reader with Mendeley readership counts from the new version 1 applications programming interface [API] in almost all fields, with one minor exception, and the correlations tended to decrease slightly when student readers were excluded. Readership followed either a lognormal or a hooked power law distribution, whereas citations always followed a hooked power law, showing that the two may have underlying differences.
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paper_title: Who reads research articles? An altmetrics analysis of Mendeley user categories

paper_content:

Little detailed information is known about who reads research articles and the contexts in which research articles are read. Using data about people who register in Mendeley as readers of articles, this article explores different types of users of Clinical Medicine, Engineering and Technology, Social Science, Physics, and Chemistry articles inside and outside academia. The majority of readers for all disciplines were PhD students, postgraduates, and postdocs but other types of academics were also represented. In addition, many Clinical Medicine articles were read by medical professionals. The highest correlations between citations and Mendeley readership counts were found for types of users who often authored academic articles, except for associate professors in some sub-disciplines. This suggests that Mendeley readership can reflect usage similar to traditional citation impact if the data are restricted to readers who are also authors without the delay of impact measured by citation counts. At the same time, Mendeley statistics can also reveal the hidden impact of some research articles, such as educational value for nonauthor users inside academia or the impact of research articles on practice for readers outside academia.
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paper_title: Social tagging in the life sciences: characterizing a new metadata resource for bioinformatics

paper_content:

BackgroundAcademic social tagging systems, such as Connotea and CiteULike, provide researchers with a means to organize personal collections of online references with keywords (tags) and to share these collections with others. One of the side-effects of the operation of these systems is the generation of large, publicly accessible metadata repositories describing the resources in the collections. In light of the well-known expansion of information in the life sciences and the need for metadata to enhance its value, these repositories present a potentially valuable new resource for application developers. Here we characterize the current contents of two scientifically relevant metadata repositories created through social tagging. This investigation helps to establish how such socially constructed metadata might be used as it stands currently and to suggest ways that new social tagging systems might be designed that would yield better aggregate products.ResultsWe assessed the metadata that users of CiteULike and Connotea associated with citations in PubMed with the following metrics: coverage of the document space, density of metadata (tags) per document, rates of inter-annotator agreement, and rates of agreement with MeSH indexing. CiteULike and Connotea were very similar on all of the measurements. In comparison to PubMed, document coverage and per-document metadata density were much lower for the social tagging systems. Inter-annotator agreement within the social tagging systems and the agreement between the aggregated social tagging metadata and MeSH indexing was low though the latter could be increased through voting.ConclusionThe most promising uses of metadata from current academic social tagging repositories will be those that find ways to utilize the novel relationships between users, tags, and documents exposed through these systems. For more traditional kinds of indexing-based applications (such as keyword-based search) to benefit substantially from socially generated metadata in the life sciences, more documents need to be tagged and more tags are needed for each document. These issues may be addressed both by finding ways to attract more users to current systems and by creating new user interfaces that encourage more collectively useful individual tagging behaviour.
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paper_title: Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

paper_content:

Altmetrics, indices based on social media platforms and tools, have recently emerged as alternative means of measuring scholarly impact. Such indices assume that scholars in fact populate online social environments, and interact with scholarly products in the social web. We tested this assumption by examining the use and coverage of social media environments amongst a sample of bibliometricians examining both their own use of online platforms and the use of their papers on social reference managers. As expected, coverage varied: 82 % of articles published by sampled bibliometricians were included in Mendeley libraries, while only 28 % were included in CiteULike. Mendeley bookmarking was moderately correlated (.45) with Scopus citation counts. We conducted a survey among the participants of the STI2012 participants. Over half of respondents asserted that social media tools were affecting their professional lives, although uptake of online tools varied widely. 68 % of those surveyed had LinkedIn accounts, while Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate each claimed a fifth of respondents. Nearly half of those responding had Twitter accounts, which they used both personally and professionally. Surveyed bibliometricians had mixed opinions on altmetrics' potential; 72 % valued download counts, while a third saw potential in tracking articles' influence in blogs, Wikipedia, reference managers, and social media. Altogether, these findings suggest that some online tools are seeing substantial use by bibliometricians, and that they present a potentially valuable source of impact data.
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paper_title: Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

paper_content:

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics", sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. ::: We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone. There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact "flavors", capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.
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paper_title: Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities: Research evaluation and knowledge flows 1

paper_content:

Although there is evidence that counting the readers of an article in the social reference site, Mendeley, may help to capture its research impact, the extent to which this is true for different scientific fields is unknown. In this study, we compare Mendeley readership counts with citations for different social sciences and humanities disciplines. The overall correlation between Mendeley readership counts and citations for the social sciences was higher than for the humanities. Low and medium correlations between Mendeley bookmarks and citation counts in all the investigated disciplines suggest that these measures reflect different aspects of research impact. Mendeley data were also used to discover patterns of information flow between scientific fields. Comparing information flows based on Mendeley bookmarking data and cross-disciplinary citation analysis for the disciplines revealed substantial similarities and some differences. Thus, the evidence from this study suggests that Mendeley readership data could be used to help capture knowledge transfer across scientific disciplines, especially for people that read but do not author articles, as well as giving impact evidence at an earlier stage than is possible with citation counts.
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paper_title: Do altmetrics follow the crowd or does the crowd follow altmetrics?

paper_content:

Changes are occurring in scholarly communication as scientific discourse and research activities spread across various social media platforms. In this paper, we study altmetrics on the article and journal levels, investigating whether the online attention received by research articles is related to scholarly impact or may be due to other factors. We define a new metric, Journal Social Impact (JSI), based on eleven data sources: CiteULike, Mendeley, F1000, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mainstream news outlets, Google Plus, Pinterest, Reddit, and sites running Stack Exchange (Q&A). We compare JSI against diverse citation-based metrics, and find that JSI significantly correlates with a number of them. These findings indicate that online attention of scholarly articles is related to traditional journal rankings and favors journals with a longer history of scholarly impact. We also find that journal-level altmetrics have strong significant correlations among themselves, compared with the weak correlations among article-level altmetrics. Another finding is that Mendeley and Twitter have the highest usage and coverage of scholarly activities. Among individual altmetrics, we find that the readership of academic social networks have the highest correlations with citation-based metrics. Our findings deepen the overall understanding of altmetrics and can assist in validating them.
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paper_title: Beyond citations: Scholars' visibility on the social Web

paper_content:

Traditionally, scholarly impact and visibility have been measured by counting publications and citations in the scholarly literature. However, increasingly scholars are also visible on the Web, establishing presences in a growing variety of social ecosystems. But how wide and established is this presence, and how do measures of social Web impact relate to their more traditional counterparts? To answer this, we sampled 57 presenters from the 2010 Leiden STI Conference, gathering publication and citations counts as well as data from the presenters' Web "footprints." We found Web presence widespread and diverse: 84% of scholars had homepages, 70% were on LinkedIn, 23% had public Google Scholar profiles, and 16% were on Twitter. For sampled scholars' publications, social reference manager bookmarks were compared to Scopus and Web of Science citations; we found that Mendeley covers more than 80% of sampled articles, and that Mendeley bookmarks are significantly correlated (r=.45) to Scopus citation counts.
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paper_title: Altmetrics: New Indicators for Scientific Communication in Web 2.0

paper_content:

In this paper we review the socalled altmetrics or alternative metrics. This concept raises from the development of new indicators based on Web 2.0, for the evaluation of the research and academic activity. The basic assumption is that variables such as mentions in blogs, number of twits or of researchers bookmarking a research paper for instance, may be legitimate indicators for measuring the use and impact of scientific publications. In this sense, these indicators are currently the focus of the bibliometric community and are being discussed and debated. We describe the main platforms and indicators and we analyze as a sample the Spanish research output in Communication Studies. Comparing traditional indicators such as citations with these new indicators. The results show that the most cited papers are also the ones with a highest impact according to the altmetrics. We conclude pointing out the main shortcomings these metrics present and the role they may play when measuring the research impact through 2.0 platforms.
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paper_title: Assessing the Impact of Publications Saved by Mendeley Users: Is There Any Different Pattern Among Users?

paper_content:

The main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact of publications read (saved) by the different users in Mendeley in order to explore the extent to which their readership counts correlate with their citation indicators. The potential of filtering highly cited papers by Mendeley readerships and its different users have been also explored. For the analysis of the users, we have considered the information of the top three Mendeley ‘users’ reported by the Mendeley. Our results show that publications with Mendeley readerships tend to have higher citation and journal citation scores than publications without readerships. ‘Biomedical & health sciences’ and ‘Mathematics and computer science’ are the fields with respectively the most and the least readership activity in Mendeley. PhD students have the highest density of readerships per publication and Lecturers and Librarians have the lowest across all the different fields. Our precision-recall analysis indicates that in general, for publications with at least one reader in Mendeley, the capacity of readerships of filtering highly cited publications is better than (or at least as good as) Journal Citation Scores. We discuss the important limitation of Mendeley of only reporting the top three readers and not all of them in the potential development of indicators based on Mendeley and its users.
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paper_title: Mendeley readership counts: An investigation of temporal and disciplinary differences

paper_content:

Scientists and managers using citation-based indicators to help evaluate research cannot evaluate recent articles because of the time needed for citations to accrue. Reading occurs before citing, however, and so it makes sense to count readers rather than citations for recent publications. To assess this, Mendeley readers and citations were obtained for articles from 2004 to late 2014 in five broad categories agriculture, business, decision science, pharmacy, and the social sciences and 50 subcategories. In these areas, citation counts tended to increase with every extra year since publication, and readership counts tended to increase faster initially but then stabilize after about 5 years. The correlation between citations and readers was also higher for longer time periods, stabilizing after about 5 years. Although there were substantial differences between broad fields and smaller differences between subfields, the results confirm the value of Mendeley reader counts as early scientific impact indicators.
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paper_title: The Vacuum Shouts Back: Postpublication Peer Review on Social Media

paper_content:

Social media has created new pathways for postpublication peer review, which regularly leads to corrections. Such online discussions are often resisted by authors and editors, however, and efforts to formalize postpublication peer review have not yet resonated with scientific communities.
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paper_title: Post-publication filtering and evaluation: Faculty of 1000

paper_content:

Faculty of 1000 (www.facultyof1000.com) is a new on-line literature awareness and assessment service of research papers, on the basis of selections by 1400 of the world's top biologists, that combines metrics with judgement. The service offers a systematic and comprehensive form of post-publication peer review that focuses on the best papers regardless of the journal in which they are published. It is now possible to draw some conclusions about how this new form of post-publication peer review meets the needs of scientists, and the organizations that fund them, in practice. In addition, inferences about the relative importance of journals are set out, which should also interest publishers and librarians.
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paper_title: Looking for Landmarks: The Role of Expert Review and Bibliometric Analysis in Evaluating Scientific Publication Outputs

paper_content:

OBJECTIVE ::: To compare expert assessment with bibliometric indicators as tools to assess the quality and importance of scientific research papers. ::: ::: ::: METHODS AND MATERIALS ::: Shortly after their publication in 2005, the quality and importance of a cohort of nearly 700 Wellcome Trust (WT) associated research papers were assessed by expert reviewers; each paper was reviewed by two WT expert reviewers. After 3 years, we compared this initial assessment with other measures of paper impact. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: Shortly after publication, 62 (9%) of the 687 research papers were determined to describe at least a 'major addition to knowledge' -6 were thought to be 'landmark' papers. At an aggregate level, after 3 years, there was a strong positive association between expert assessment and impact as measured by number of citations and F1000 rating. However, there were some important exceptions indicating that bibliometric measures may not be sufficient in isolation as measures of research quality and importance, and especially not for assessing single papers or small groups of research publications. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSION ::: When attempting to assess the quality and importance of research papers, we found that sole reliance on bibliometric indicators would have led us to miss papers containing important results as judged by expert review. In particular, some papers that were highly rated by experts were not highly cited during the first three years after publication. Tools that link expert peer reviews of research paper quality and importance to more quantitative indicators, such as citation analysis would be valuable additions to the field of research assessment and evaluation.
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paper_title: F1000 Recommendations as a Potential New Data Source for Research Evaluation: A Comparison With Citations

paper_content:

F1000 is a postpublication peer review service for biological and medical research. F1000 recommends important publications in the biomedical literature, and from this perspective F1000 could be an interesting tool for research evaluation. By linking the complete database of F1000 recommendations to the Web of Science bibliographic database, we are able to make a comprehensive comparison between F1000 recommendations and citations. We find that about 2% of the publications in the biomedical literature receive at least one F1000 recommendation. Recommended publications on average receive 1.30 recommendations, and more than 90% of the recommendations are given within half a year after a publication has appeared. There turns out to be a clear correlation between F1000 recommendations and citations. However, the correlation is relatively weak, at least weaker than the correlation between journal impact and citations. More research is needed to identify the main reasons for differences between recommendations and citations in assessing the impact of publications.
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paper_title: The Assessment of Science: The Relative Merits of Post-Publication Review, the Impact Factor, and the Number of Citations

paper_content:

The assessment of scientific publications is an integral part of the scientific process. Here we investigate three methods of assessing the merit of a scientific paper: subjective post-publication peer review, the number of citations gained by a paper, and the impact factor of the journal in which the article was published. We investigate these methods using two datasets in which subjective post-publication assessments of scientific publications have been made by experts. We find that there are moderate, but statistically significant, correlations between assessor scores, when two assessors have rated the same paper, and between assessor score and the number of citations a paper accrues. However, we show that assessor score depends strongly on the journal in which the paper is published, and that assessors tend to over-rate papers published in journals with high impact factors. If we control for this bias, we find that the correlation between assessor scores and between assessor score and the number of citations is weak, suggesting that scientists have little ability to judge either the intrinsic merit of a paper or its likely impact. We also show that the number of citations a paper receives is an extremely error-prone measure of scientific merit. Finally, we argue that the impact factor is likely to be a poor measure of merit, since it depends on subjective assessment. We conclude that the three measures of scientific merit considered here are poor; in particular subjective assessments are an error-prone, biased, and expensive method by which to assess merit. We argue that the impact factor may be the most satisfactory of the methods we have considered, since it is a form of pre-publication review. However, we emphasise that it is likely to be a very error-prone measure of merit that is qualitative, not quantitative.
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paper_title: Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

paper_content:

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics", sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. ::: We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone. There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact "flavors", capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.
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paper_title: Assessing non-standard article impact using F1000 labels

paper_content:

Faculty of 1000 (F1000) is a post-publishing peer review web site where experts evaluate and rate biomedical publications. F1000 reviewers also assign labels to each paper from a standard list or article types. This research examines the relationship between article types, citation counts and F1000 article factors (FFa). For this purpose, a random sample of F1000 medical articles from the years 2007 and 2008 were studied. In seven out of the nine cases, there were no significant differences between the article types in terms of citation counts and FFa scores. Nevertheless, citation counts and FFa scores were significantly different for two article types: "New finding" and "Changes clinical practice": FFa scores value the appropriateness of medical research for clinical practice and "New finding" articles are more highly cited. It seems that highlighting key features of medical articles alongside ratings by Faculty members of F1000 could help to reveal the hidden value of some medical papers.
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paper_title: Do ‘ Faculty of 1000 ’ ( F 1000 ) ratings of ecological publications serve as reasonable predictors of their future impact ?

paper_content:

There is an increasing demand for an effective means of post-publication evaluation of ecological work that avoids pitfalls associated with using the impact factor of the journal in which the work was published. One approach that has been gaining momentum is the 'Faculty of 1000' (hereafter F1000) evaluation procedure, in which panel members identify what they believe to be the most 'important' recent publications they have read. Here I focused on 1530 publications from 7 major ecological journals that appeared in 2005, and compared the F1000 rating of each publication with the frequency with which it was subsequently cited. The mean and median citation frequencies of the 103 publications highlighted by F1000 was higher than for all 1530 publications, but not substantially so. Further, the F1000 procedure did not highlight any of the 11 publications that were each cited over 130 (and up to 497) times, while it did highlight 14 publications that were each cited between 4 and 9 times. Further, 46% and 31% of all manuscripts highlighted by F1000 were cited less often than the mean and median respectively of all 1530 publications. Possible reasons for the F1000 process failing to identify high impact publications may include uneven coverage by F1000 of different ecological topics, cronyism, and geographical bias favoring North American publications. As long as the F1000 process cannot identify those publications that subsequently have the greatest impact, it cannot be reliably used as a means of post-publication evaluation of the ecological literature.
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Title: Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: a review of the literature

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Provide an overview of the shifts and trends in scholarly communication, the rise of social media and altmetrics in academia, and introduce key themes of visibility and heterogeneity.

Section 2: Social data sharing
Description 2: Discuss the requirement for data sharing by funders and journals, the establishment of data sharing platforms, usage patterns, and the early stages of metrics based on data sharing.

Section 3: Video
Description 3: Explore the role of video in scholarly communication, the popularity of platforms like YouTube and TED, and the passive versus active use of video content by scholars.

Section 4: Blogging
Description 4: Review the history and impact of scholarly blogging, its formats, content, and issues related to blog citations, blog coverage, and the influence of blogs on scholarly communication.

Section 5: Microblogging
Description 5: Examine the development of microblogging, particularly Twitter, its usage in academic contexts, content, networking benefits, coverage, correlations with citations, and influences on scholarly communication.

Section 6: Wikis
Description 6: Analyze the use of wikis for academic collaboration, the role of Wikipedia in scholarly research, contribution rates, and the comparison between traditional publishing and wikis.

Section 7: Social recommending, rating, and reviewing
Description 7: Detail the platforms developed for filtering scientific content through recommendations and ratings, the effectiveness of open peer review, and the use of tools like F1000Prime and Pubpeer.

Section 8: Scholarly use by institutions and organizations
Description 8: Describe how universities, libraries, journals, publishers, and professional associations use social media to disseminate research, engage audiences, and promote scholarly communication.

Section 9: Factors affecting social media use
Description 9: Identify demographic and contextual factors that influence social media use among scholars, including age, academic rank, gender, discipline, country, and language.

Section 10: Social media and research evaluation
Description 10: Discuss the growing importance of demonstrating societal impact, the conceptualization and classification of altmetrics, criticisms, and limitations of using social media metrics for research evaluation.

Section 11: Data collection and methodological limitations
Description 11: Address the tools for collecting and aggregating social media metrics, issues of data quality, the impact of bots, demographic analyses, and comparisons with citation-based metrics.

Section 12: Social media metrics
Description 12: Review how social media metrics are used for research evaluation, coverage and correlations with traditional metrics, and the diverse utility of different social media platforms.

Section 13: Conclusion and outlook
Description 13: Summarize the key findings, the impact of digital and social media on scholarly communication, and the potential future directions for social media and altmetrics in academic research dissemination and evaluation.