Feature
Emmanuel Thiveaud, Clarivate Analytics
“Much more
research is required to understand different altmetrics indicators – their nature, meaning, and dynamics”
developments are the Impact Agenda in the REF being less dependent on Impact Factors, as well as the continuing growth of Altmetrics.
Recently it has seemed as if altmetrics were going to overtake traditional metrics in terms of importance. What are your views on this? Roelandse: To me this seems more complex. Altmetrics are a clear enrichment for articles and help the author to establish the reach and impact of his work. Only altmetrics, citations and downloads combined provide this insight. Thiveaud: Much more research is required to understand different altmetrics indicators – their nature, meaning, and dynamics – and whether they are related in any way to research impact even as more broadly defined. For those that give insight to impact, there will be a need to normalise the indicators for age and field or topic, something that is only beginning. There is no prospect at the moment that altmetrics will ‘overtake’ traditional metrics. No one metric, either traditional or alternative, is going to provide a definitive answer about the value of a journal or paper. Metrics are best used in combination to obtain a complete picture – is a paper with a high download rate
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also highly cited? Some may supplement traditional metrics, but it is very early days still. Hardcastle: Altmetrics as a term covers a wide range of attention and measures that should not be treated as a single homogeneous group. Measures such as references in policy documents and use in reading lists are very different to tweets or Facebook posts. It seems unlikely that the number of tweets a research article receives will be used to evaluate
its ‘quality’. However, other altmetric indicators are closer to traditional citation metrics in what they measure, with Mendeley readers being a good leading indicator of future citations. The Altmetric Manifesto focused heavily on using altmetric tools as a filter to help readers deal with the ever growing quantity of outputs. Instead tools such as
Altmetric.com and ImpactStory are more focused on authors, publishers and institutions gathering information about the attention content receives. There hasn’t yet been a big push to altmetric services for readers.
Henning Schoenenberger, Springer Nature
“Journal Impact Factor continues to be an important long term metric for assessing journal performance”
Does the Journal Impact Factor have a long-term future? Henning Schoenenberger, director for product data and metadata management, Springer Nature: While the variety of alternative indicators measuring the impact of scientific research and researchers is continuously increasing, Journal Impact Factor continues to be an important long term metric for assessing journal performance, for all its known short-comings and lack of granularity. Thiveaud: Yes, it does. DORA was an important reminder to stop using this journal performance measure in a manner for which it was not intended, that is, the assessment of individual papers or researchers. Misuse of the journal impact factor does not make the measure invalid, however. It has proven to be a reliable and authoritative guide to journal performance, influence, and stature for librarians and for the research community for more than 40 years. In fact, its use is growing, especially as publishers in rapidly developing regions are seeking to improve their journal offerings and
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