Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the altmetrics category.
Eliminating Friction
Update: A version of this post appeared in SURF magazine (on the back page) in their trendwatching column
Technology at its best lets us do what we want to do without being held back by time consuming or complex processes. We see this in great consumer technology: your phone giving you directions to the nearest cafe, your calendar reminding you of a friend’s birthday, or a website telling you what films are on. Good technology removes friction.
While attending the SURF Research day, I was reminded that this idea of removing friction through technology shouldn’t be limited to consumer or business environments but should also be applied in academic research settings. The day showcased a variety of developments in information technology to help researchers do better research. Because SURF is a Dutch organization there was a particular focus on developments here in the Netherlands.
The day began with a fantastic keynote from Cameron Neylon outlining how networks qualitatively change how research can be communicated. A key point was that to create the best networks we need to make research communication as frictionless as possible. You can find his longer argument here. After Cameron’s talk, Jos Engelen the chairman of the NWO (the Dutch NSF) gave some remarks. For me, the key take-away was that in every one of the Dutch Government’s 9 Priority Sectors, technology has a central role in smoothing both the research process and its transition to practice.
After the opening session, there were four parallel sessions on text analysis, dealing with data, profiling research, and technology for research education. I managed to attend parts of three of the sessions. In the profiling session, the recently released SURF Report on tracking the impact of scholarly publications in the 21st century, sparked my interest. Finding new faster and broader ways of measuring impact (i.e. altmetrics) is a way of reducing friction in science communication. The ESCAPE project showed how enriched publications can make it easy to collate and browse related content around traditional articles. The project won SURF’s enriched publication of the year award. Again, the key, simplifying the research process. Beyond these presentations, there were talks ranging from making it easier to do novel chemistry to helping religious scholars understand groups through online forms. In each case, the technology was successful because it eliminated friction in the research process.
The SURF research day presented not just technology but how, when it’s done right, technology can make research just a bit smoother.
Like this:
A Quick Overview of Altmetrics
This past Tuesday, I had the opportunity to give a webinar for Elsevier Labs giving an overview of altmetrics. It was a fun opportunity to talk to people who have a great chance to influence the next generation of academic measurement. The slides are embedded below.
At the VU, we are also working with Elsevier Labs on the Data2Semantics project where we are trying to enrich data with additional machine understandable metadata. How does this relate to metrics? I believe that metrics (access, usage, etc) can be e a key piece of additional semantics for datasets. I’m keen to see how metrics can make our data more useful, findable and understandable.
altmetrics11 wrap-up
It’s been about two weeks since we had the almetrics11 Workshop at Web Science 2011 but I was swamped with the ISWC conference deadline so I just got around till posting about this now.
The aim of the workshp was to gather together the group of people working on next generation measures of science based on the Web. Importantly, as organizers, Jason, Dario and I wanted to encourage the growth of the scientific side of altmetrics.
The workshop turned out to be way better than I expected. We had roughly 36 attendees, which was way beyond our expectations. You can see some of the attendees here:
There was nice representation from my institution (VU University Amsterdam) including talks by my collaborators Peter van den Besselaar and Julie Birkholtz. But we had attendees from Israel, the UK, the US and all over Europe. People were generally excited about the event and the discussions went well (although the room was really warm). I think we all had a good time the restaurant, the Alt-Coblenz – highly recommended by the way-and an appropriate name. Thanks to the WebSci organizing team for putting this together.
We had a nice mix of social scientists and computer scientists (~16 & 20 respectively). Importantly, we had representation from the bibliometrics community, social studies of science, and computer science.
Importantly, for an emerging community, there was a real honesty about the research. Good results were shown but importantly almost every author discussed where the gaps were in their own research.
Two discussions come to the fore for me. One was on how we evaluate altmetrics. Mike Thelwall who gave the keynote (great job by the way) suggests using correlations to the journal impact factor to help demonstrate that there is something scientifically valid that your measuring. What you want is not perfect correlation but correlation with a gap and that gap is what your new alternative metric is then measuring. There was also the notion from Peter van den Besselaar is that we should look more closely our how our metrics match what scientists do in practice (i.e. qualitative studies). For example, do our metrics correlate with promotions or hiring. The second discussion was around where to go next with altmetrics. In particular, there was a discussion on how to position altmetrics in the research field and really it seemed to position itself within and across the fields of science studies (i.e scientometrics, webometrics,virtual ethnograpy ). Importantly, it was felt that we needed a good common corpus of information in order to comparative studies of metrics. Altmetrics has the problem of data acquisition. While some people are interested in that others want to focus on metric generation and evaluation. A corpus of traces of science online was felt to be a good way to interconnect both data acquisition and metric generation and allow for such comparative studies. But how to build the corpus….Suggestions welcome.
The attendees wanted to have an altmetrics12 so I’m pretty sure we will do that. Additionally, we will have some exciting news soon about a journal special issue on altmetrics.
Some more links:
Also, could someone leave a link to the twitter archive in the comments? That would be great.
