I do not think of using social media especially built for academics (academia.edu, RG), but those of the "common" type like twitter and fb.
Increasing visibility of your research through techniques can be used in digital marketing (article marketing, link building, gathering likes, retweets, g+1s and similar). This would certainly influence article metrics and download statistics for OA articles by driving traffic to them.
The thing is that we will not know the relevancy of that traffic, i.e. is it coming from other experts around the world or from a 10-year-old kid who googled "anime" and found the article "Techno-Orientalism and media-tribalism: On Japanese animation and rave culture". If this is so, how and where can altmetrics be useful towards evaluating a researchers' contribution to the field?
Do you have any example or experience of altmetrics playing a role, however small it is, in research performance evaluation?
Hi Janos! We here at Impactstory have researchers tell us from time to time when they successfully apply for funding or promotion & tenure using altmetrics.
One good example from U of Washington is Steven B Roberts, who included altmetrics in his (successful) bid for tenure: http://chronicle.com/article/Rise-of-Altmetrics-Revives/139557/
And Emilio Bruna, from U of Florida, included altmetrics in his (successful) bid for promotion as well as an application for a prestigious campus award: http://blog.impactstory.org/contest-winner/
On to your other question: how do you know if it's a child tweeting a paper instead of an expert in your field? Well, that's where rich data comes in (at the moment). Altmetric.com and other altmetrics providers (including Impactstory) allow you to click through the tweets to see a full list of all the tweets about a paper. And Altmetric has a bonus layer of value: they have manually coded many scientists' Twitter profiles, so their system can tell you when a scientist tweets about your work, rather than a layperson (or a child :) ).
Many have been talking recently about the need for sentiment analysis of altmetrics, and it looks as though that's where the field may be headed soon. But until then, reading the actual tweets, blog posts, facebook shares, etc is the best way to truly understand impact, beyond the mere numbers.
You are seeing Academic Marketing with respect to researcher..As i practice Organization Marketing.. a few words to say...
There is HIT-MISS ratio Analysis... wherein a quest for someone will get satisfied only where is a "DEMAND-SUPPLY Equilibrium"... searching in an area where there is lesser probability to succeed is not a process... but a vague unrelated search.
To be specific RG is the media for RESEARCHERS or researchers search Engine..
Hi Janos, I don't have any specific examples so I am just reflecting on the problem your question raises about context. That in a way is the benefit of citations. They occur in the context of peer reviewed journals and citation approximates to an indication of the value of the article cited. I know at low levels of citation this doesn't mean much, but I always think that as the citations increase, say above 5 (and this needs to be further considered in the context of discipline/subject where citation practice varies) it does mean something.
I can see alt metrics working where the context is understood. Mendeley is by an large an academic tool used by researchers and academics so the Mendeley Readers count on an article in Mendeley can approximate to a judgement of peers. The same might be true of downloads on PLOS or similar websites. I struggle to see how Twitter mentions can happen in a known context, or Google directed downloads. I think alt metrics has to be sensitive to context.
I do think the "modern" researcher needs to be adept at promoting and marketing themselves and their research through social media, but that might not have a direct and measurable impact in the way you propose. BW Matt
Hi Janos! We here at Impactstory have researchers tell us from time to time when they successfully apply for funding or promotion & tenure using altmetrics.
One good example from U of Washington is Steven B Roberts, who included altmetrics in his (successful) bid for tenure: http://chronicle.com/article/Rise-of-Altmetrics-Revives/139557/
And Emilio Bruna, from U of Florida, included altmetrics in his (successful) bid for promotion as well as an application for a prestigious campus award: http://blog.impactstory.org/contest-winner/
On to your other question: how do you know if it's a child tweeting a paper instead of an expert in your field? Well, that's where rich data comes in (at the moment). Altmetric.com and other altmetrics providers (including Impactstory) allow you to click through the tweets to see a full list of all the tweets about a paper. And Altmetric has a bonus layer of value: they have manually coded many scientists' Twitter profiles, so their system can tell you when a scientist tweets about your work, rather than a layperson (or a child :) ).
Many have been talking recently about the need for sentiment analysis of altmetrics, and it looks as though that's where the field may be headed soon. But until then, reading the actual tweets, blog posts, facebook shares, etc is the best way to truly understand impact, beyond the mere numbers.
It's probably too early to answer the question finally. But some evidence points to a positive influence of general social media outreach - especially tweets and retweets of articles - on citations later on. Check out this study by Eysenbach in this regard: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/
Matt makes a very good point about context sensitivity, though. In some disciplines, where social media use is more prevalent (let's say information & computer science, communication, e-health, digital humanities etc.), altmetrics on general social media platforms might have more of a an impact. This study features some nice numbers on the social media adoption in different research disciplines: http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1926/4039.full
As committees increasingly require researchers to show the social and practical impact of their output, altmetrics can be a good way to prove outreach that is not directly measurable by citations. On academia.edu, I'm always amazed how people from very different countries (and probably also backgrounds) come across my contributions via Google (I've had views from Pakistan, Nigeria, Hong Kong, UK, Belgium, USA, India, Taiwan, Austria... recently). I think showing that research reaches people beyond the usual and intended audience is a strong argument for applications and research evaluation.
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