Altmetrics: Meaning, Role and Its Importance in Libraries

Author(s): Ramyia Shreejesh

Abstract:

Almetrics or Social web-based metrics is used as tool for measuring research impact beyond the scientific communities to measure the impact of academic research. The Idea being the web is not just used by academics and therefore data from the web about academic research may be used as method of measuring the wider impact of that research. Almetrics extract data from wider range of platforms from bibliographic services like Mendeley, Researchgate or Academia to general social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube and Plenty more sources from the web. The present study explores the meaning, sources, categories, pros & cons of altmetrics and its importance in libraries. Altmetrics is relatively new field but in a way extension of bibliometric studies. Its importance cannot be underplayed due to the limitations of others bibliometrics like peer-review, citation counting and journal average citation. Altmetrics is considered to be the alternative metrics and to be used as complementary with the other traditional metrics. Librarian can play a pivotal role in training and promoting of various altmetric tools amongst the student, teacher and researchers to enhance their article-level metrics and relevance in the current research landscape.

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Pages: 01-04     |    4 View     |    1 Download