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Social Media and Altmetrics: An Overview of Current Alternative Approaches to Measuring Scholarly Impact

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Incentives and Performance

Abstract

This chapter describes the current state of the art in altmetrics research and practice. Altmetrics—evaluation methods of scholarly activities that serve as alternatives to citation-based metrics—are a relatively new but quickly growing area of research. For example, researchers are expecting that altmetrics that are based on social media data will reflect a broader public’s perception of science and will provide timely reactions to new scientific findings. This chapter explains how altmetrics have emerged and how they are related to the academic use of social media. It also provides an overview of current altmetric tools and potential data sources for computing alternative metrics, such as blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking services, and Wikipedia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to the Alexa.com ranking as of June 2014, the most accessed Web sites include Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany

    Katrin Weller

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  1. Katrin Weller
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Correspondence to Katrin Weller .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. TUM School of Management, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Isabell M. Welpe

  2. TUM School of Management, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Jutta Wollersheim

  3. TUM School of Management, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Stefanie Ringelhan

  4. Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany, and University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Margit Osterloh

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Weller, K. (2015). Social Media and Altmetrics: An Overview of Current Alternative Approaches to Measuring Scholarly Impact. In: Welpe, I., Wollersheim, J., Ringelhan, S., Osterloh, M. (eds) Incentives and Performance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09785-5_16

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