Brisbane Altmetrics workshop

Over the past few months I’ve written about altmetrics and impact for example here and here

Yesterday I went to an ANDS sponsored workshop on Altmetrics and Impact in Brisbane - you can find my meeting notes online here - it’s an evernote share of a pdf, and you may be asked to click to view to get to the actual note.

As a calibration exercise it was incredibly useful - it convinced me that we’re roughly in the right place with altmetrics, namely

• no one has a complete view on altmetrics, impact and engagement
• attempts at quantification are partial at best
• academic publishers are interested and investing in altmetrics due to change in their business model
  
  • attempt is by maintaining relevance and providing specialist services
• impact is increasingly seen as an important alternative to classic citation rates
• impact measurement tools are partial at best

So, altmetrics, bibliometrics or what have you will provide some interesting times. One interesting aside was that someone had used text analysis techniques on a set of pharmaceutical papers suggesting that one company may have an in house ghost writing team. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - having documentation or writing specialists finesse text is by no means bad, although there has to be a question as to whether there may be an attempt to game the system by producing more readily citable papers.

Whether or not it is the case, I found it quite a nice use of the power of open access and being able to reuse documents as data for other analyses …

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