Search Article 
 
Advanced search 
Official publication of the American Biodontics Society and the Center for Research and Education in Technology
Home About us Editorial board Search Ahead of print Current issue Archives Submit article Instructions Subscribe Contacts Login 


 
 Table of Contents  
EDITORIAL
Year : 2015  |  Volume : 6  |  Issue : 1  |  Page : 1-2

Altmetrics: A new emerging issue for dental research scientists


Independent Research Scientist, Founder and Managing Editor of Dental Hypotheses, Isfahan, Iran

Date of Web Publication5-Feb-2015

Correspondence Address:
Jafar Kolahi
N0 24, Faree 15, Pardis, Shahin Shahr, Isfahan-83179 18981
Iran
Login to access the Email id

Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None


DOI: 10.4103/2155-8213.150855

Rights and Permissions

How to cite this article:
Kolahi J. Altmetrics: A new emerging issue for dental research scientists. Dent Hypotheses 2015;6:1-2

How to cite this URL:
Kolahi J. Altmetrics: A new emerging issue for dental research scientists. Dent Hypotheses [serial online] 2015 [cited 2023 Jun 9];6:1-2. Available from: http://www.dentalhypotheses.com/text.asp?2015/6/1/1/150855

Impact factor (IF) is well-known among researches as classic measurement for scientific productivity. It measures the average number of citations to recent articles published in a journal. SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is an improved alternative for IF which uses an algorithm similar to Google PageRank. [1] SJR uses raw citation data of Scopus. SJR is a prestige metric based on the idea that "all citations are not created equal," in which citations from high prestige journal will have more value. Eigen factor is derived from a similar philosophy to SJR. Yet, it use raw data of Thomson Reuters (www.eigenfactor.org). Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) introduced by Leiden University and used Scopus data (www.journalindicators.com). It measures the average number of citations like IF. Yet unlike IF, SNIP corrects for differences in citation practices between different scientific fields, thus allowing for more accurate between-field comparisons of citation impact.

Nevertheless, what is altmetrics? Above-mentioned measures focus on citations from other scientific journals. Yet, altmetrics choose another course for citations; online scholarly tools.

Data resources for altmetric analysis would be [Figure 1]:

  1. Social media data, e.g., Twitter, Google +, Facebook (public posts), SinaWeibo, YouTube, Scholarly blogs, etc.
  2. Online reference managers, e.g., Mendeley, CiteULike.
  3. News sources pages, e.g., Time, Reuters, Cristian Science monitor, etc.
Figure 1: Schematic diagram for data resources of altmetric analysis including: Social media, online reference managers, and news agencies

Click here to view


Two popular sources of altmetric analysis are: Altmetric (www.altmetric.com) and ImpactStory (www.impactstory.org).

ImpactStory is a subscription-based application that makes it easy to analyze altmetrics getting data from many sources, from Scopus and Mendeley to GitHub, Twitter, Figshare, and more, and displays it in a single, permanent link for an author, e.g., https://impactstory.org/CarlBoettiger.

Altmetric is another interesting and popular source. It gives altmetric score to articles and compares it with articles of the journal, articles of a similar age, and all articles at Altmetric data base. Altmetric score is a weighted count of the different sources (newspaper stories, tweets, blog posts, comments) that refer to the paper. The following link showed an example: http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?citation_id=2691846.

Nevertheless, both classic and altmetric approaches have their own strengths and weakness. For example, citations from articles which disagree with a paper will have positive effect on its impact factor. Usefulness of altmetrics is an issue of controversy among scientists. Clearly altmetric can be used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. The finding of a recent study showed strong evidence that six altmetric resources (tweets, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blog mentions, mainstream media mentions, and forum posts) associate with citation counts in medical and biological sciences. The results also suggest that Google+ posts might perchance have little or no association with citations, and too little data was available to be confident about whether four of the altmetric resources (LinkedIn, pinners, questions, and reddits) associate with citation counts. [2] Another recent research indicated altmetrics complement, and most correlate significantly with, classic citation-based measures. [3]

On the other hand, some researchers believe that altmetrics is not reliable because it may be done by non-scientist which shows they attracted to buzzwords in titles. For example, surveys revealed that the great majority of scientists do not use Twitter (7-13%). According to this point of view, altmetrics only measure online attention surrounding journal articles and not measuring scientific quality. [4]

However, interests in altmetric are growing fast [Figure 2]. Yet, easy search of dental journals in PubMed by the key word "altmetric*" at January 19, 2015 showed no article. Hence, as a final point, I believe that authors and editors of dental journals must pay more attention to altmetrics as a new and fast tool to measure scholarly social impact.
Figure 2: The results of Google search for "altmetric" (red line) and "bibliometrics" (blue line). The horizontal axis of the graph shows time, and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches, globally. Cut-offs show future forecast. Data are from http:// trends.google.com

Click here to view


 
  References Top

1.
Scimago Journal & Country Rank. Available from: http://www.scimagojr.com/howtocite.php [Last accessed on 2015 Jan 17].  Back to cited text no. 1
    
2.
Thelwall M, Haustein S, Larivière V, Sugimoto CR. Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services. PLoS One 2013;8:e64841.  Back to cited text no. 2
    
3.
Liu CL, Xu YQ, Wu H, Chen SS, Guo JJ. Correlation and interaction visualization of altmetric indicators extracted from scholarly social network activities: Dimensions and structure. J Med Internet Res 2013;15:e259.  Back to cited text no. 3
    
4.
Why you should ignore altmetrics and other bibliometric nightmares. Available from: http://www.dcscience.net/2014/01/16/why-you-should-ignore-altmetrics-and-other-bibliometric-nightmares/ [Last accessed on 2015 Jan 17].  Back to cited text no. 4
    


    Figures

  [Figure 1], [Figure 2]


This article has been cited by
1 Meta-Analysis of Correlations between Altmetric Attention Score and Citations in Health Sciences
Jafar Kolahi,Saber Khazaei,Pedram Iranmanesh,Jeehyoung Kim,Heejung Bang,Abbasali Khademi,Paolo Boffano
BioMed Research International. 2021; 2021: 1
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
2 Kind Attention to the Altitude of Altmetrics
Shekar Shobana
Brazilian Dental Journal. 2020; 31(5): 457
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
3 Altmetric analysis of contemporary Iranian Medical Journals
Jafar Kolahi,Saber Khazaei,Elham Bidram,Roya Kelishadi
International Journal of Preventive Medicine. 2019; 10(1): 112
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
4 Altmetric analysis of the contemporary scientific literature in Endodontology
J. Kolahi,S. Khazaei,P. Iranmanesh,A. Khademi,M. H. Nekoofar,P. M. H. Dummer
International Endodontic Journal. 2019;
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
5 Analysis of highly tweeted dental journals and articles: a science mapping approach
Jafar Kolahi,Saber Khazaei,Pedram Iranmanesh,Parisa Soltani
British Dental Journal. 2019; 226(9): 673
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
6 Altmetric analysis of contemporary dental literature
J. Kolahi,S. Khazaei
BDJ. 2018; 225(1): 68
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
7 Global science discussed in local altmetrics: Weibo and its comparison with Twitter
Houqiang Yu,Shenmeng Xu,Tingting Xiao,Brad M. Hemminger,Siluo Yang
Journal of Informetrics. 2017; 11(2): 466
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
8 Altmetric analysis of 2015 dental literature: a cross sectional survey
J. Kolahi,P. Iranmanesh,S. Khazaei
BDJ. 2017; 222(9): 695
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
9 Altmetric: Top 50 dental articles in 2014
J. Kolahi,S. Khazaei
BDJ. 2016; 220(11): 569
[Pubmed] | [DOI]



 

Top
 
 
  Search
 
Similar in PUBMED
   Search Pubmed for
   Search in Google Scholar for
Access Statistics
Email Alert *
Add to My List *
* Registration required (free)

 
  In this article
References
Article Figures

 Article Access Statistics
    Viewed5918    
    Printed267    
    Emailed0    
    PDF Downloaded622    
    Comments [Add]    
    Cited by others 9    

Recommend this journal