Measure of Scientific Impact: How Altmetrics Can Innovate the Approach in a Multidimensional Model

Valeria Scotti,Luigia Scudeller,Funda Topuz,Chiara Rebuffi,Moreno Curti,Annalisa De Silvestri

doi:10.29024/joa.23

Abstract

With the development of the web 2.0 social media era and the rapid increase of open access journals, novel alternative analytic metrics, known as altmetrics, have emerged. Altmetrics are not substitutes for traditional bibliometrics; however, they function as complementary additions to assess both impact and influence of a research project on the society (e.g., patients). The goal of this research was to analyze our scientific production and determine how this could help us evaluate our scientific production, research themes, and research with greater impact. Our analysis shows that some research themes had unexpected good altmetric scores compared to traditional citations, and we confirmed a high correlation between altmetric scores and standard bibliometric indexes at the institutional level. Our study shows that altmetrics are mature enough to represent an interesting complement to citation and impact factor.

Highlights

The problem of measuring the scientific and social impact of research publications has been of extreme interest to scientists and scholars, as the first source of research waste chain (Macleod et al 2014) is the limited relevance of many research questions to patients
How can we help our researchers with this new data? Using courses, training, help in completing a CV or something new? How can we use this data for the institution? What are the clinics that get the most citations and altmetric scores? Which lines of research are most attractive? What was the citational trend over the years of our hospital?
Some of our researchers are interested in including altmetrics scores in their CV. b) Good correlation between Altmetric.com score and traditional metrics (WOS citation) is observed (Figure 3) for the whole period and for each year considered separately (r ranging from 0.33 in 2012 and 0.45 in 2013)

Summary

Introduction

The problem of measuring the scientific and social impact of research publications has been of extreme interest to scientists and scholars, as the first source of research waste chain (Macleod et al 2014) is the limited relevance of many research questions to patients. Taking into account their opinion in selecting research priorities should lead to improvement in research and decrease of waste. The principal users of clinical and epidemiological research are clinicians and the patients who look to them for help. Both are often frustrated by mismatches between the uncertainties that they wish to see addressed in research and the questions that researchers choose to investigate (Liberati 2011)

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Conclusion