Altmetrics
Altmetrics and Societal Impact
Altmetrics and Societal Impact
What is the societal impact of scholarly research?
As the communication of research increasingly takes place on social media and other online platforms, there is enormous potential to capture and analyze digital traces left by scholars. This offers, for the first time, the opportunity to study at large scale—using both quantitative and qualitative methods—the processes of knowledge dissemination and co-creation between academia and the public.
Taking advantage of this opportunity, this project uses a variety of innovative new approaches to explore the societal impact of research. Drawing on data from a diverse array of digital platforms, we are investigating questions such as: Who shares academic work on social media? What can Altmetrics tell us about the public's use of research? How might scholars use this knowledge to inform their dissemination strategies? And what information is missing from the picture?
Related Publications
Altmetrics
Altmetrics
How do we engage with scholarly research?
Engagement on Facebook
Asura Enkhbayar, Juan Pablo Alperin
Today, more than 2.2 billion people use Facebook on a daily or almost daily basis. Yet despite its popularity, previous research shows that Facebook is less frequently used to share academic content than other platforms. Perhaps because surprisingly little is know about the nature of Facebook user engagement—especially when it comes to scholarly research. Are people discussing new studies in invite-only groups? Swapping papers in personal messages? Posting articles to private walls?
In this study, we are investigating the current state of Altmetrics for Facebook to better understand how users communicate about scholarly research on this popular platform. Specifically, we are examining what forms of sharing might be overlooked by today’s Altmetrics methods, what the challenges are of measuring that engagement, and how the current system could be improved to capture those important avenues of communication.
From Mendeley Readership to Citations
Fereshteh Didegah, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Rodrigo Costas
With more than 3 million users in 180 countries, Mendeley has established itself as a major global research collaboration and networking program since its launch in 2009. Yet, despite its increasing popularity, relatively little is known about how academics engage with the platform on a daily basis. Who are Mendley’s users and how are they using its services?
This project aims to shed light on these questions by investigating one key Mendley product: the library. Starting with a pilot study, we analyzed the extent to which users cite the articles saved in their libraries by matching Mendeley user profiles with Scopus author profiles. We found that only 5% of them cited at least one of those articles, showing that the correlations found in previous research do not tell the full story. Now we are exploring the meaning of Mendeley saves further by expanding this pilot to a larger scale dataset across different subject domains.
Related Publications
Asura Enkhbayar
Asura Enkhbayar is an Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies PhD student and data scientist at the ScholCommLab working under the supervision of Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin. He is interested in critically exploring the infrastructure of scholarly communication in the 21st century at the intersection of philosophy and technology. Following an undergraduate degree in electronics, Asura studied cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. His previous studies equipped him with the skills needed to tackle a mediatized and data-intense domain, while acknowledging the need for more qualitative work and a solid theoretical foundation. His doctoral research aims to investigate the role and impact of open infrastructure—as in the case of traditional and new research metrics, citation indices, or open access initiatives—in scholarly communication.
In his role as a data scientist he is working on a wide variety of issues related to his doctoral research, including empirical projects focusing on altmetrics, open access, and open science. Apart from collecting and analysing data, he also writes terrible research software, as expected of a proper data scientist.
Asura remains an advocate for open scholarship, contributes to Open Knowledge Maps and, most importantly, played the main role of Yu in the martial arts short-film The Dojo Part II (watch the trailer on Vimeo). You can find him on Twitter and Github.