Citation analysis is the dominate method for research assessment but it is not perfect. Although citation-based metrics have been improved to evaluate research performance more effectively, all the measures have some inherent limitations rooted in the nature of citation practice. Altmetrics is a new movement which tries to find complementary measures for traditional metrics based on scholars’ activities on the social web platforms. In my PhD project I focus on new measure to capture non-traditional research impact based on altmetrics tools. For instance, in a case study we realized that highlighting key features of medical articles alongside ratings by F1000 experts, a post publishing peer review system, could be useful to reveal some hidden value of some medical papers. Moreover, in a large-scales study we found significant but not strong correlations between Mendeley bookmarks data and citation counts for ten social sciences and humanities disciplines and it means that these two metrics don’t measure the same research impact.
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1 thought on “Measuring Non-standard research impact?”
Altmetrics
Thanks for the post, Ehsan. We were just discussing this at a pre-BtPDF2 event. To what extent do you think this is due to the number and/or types of users in Mendeley?