Research and Academic Leadership: Gaming with Altmetrics in the Digital Age

Abstract

Our paper aimed at contemplating over the novel measures of research functionality and efficiency used for measuring academic leadership from the point of view of internationalization of academic publishing and introduction of global research career paths. For instance, we argue that there is an interesting idea behind altmetrics such as PlumX but its technical deployment seems to have certain loopholes that might involve the use of altmetrics, for example, gaming with metrics using the Dark Web, and that need to be fixed. The recent addition to Scopus is the PlumX metrics originally designed by Plum Analytics. Its purpose is to measure the “societal impact” of science by monitoring the social media such as social networks, personal pages, and blogs. The question remains, however, whether academics need yet another metrics for proving to themselves and to the society that their research output has some value. Moreover, it appears that recent attempts to measure the “societal impact” of science remain unclear and need more polishing up before they can start to be widely accepted by the research community.