Altmetrics 2014 - International Workshop on expanding impacts and metrics

Altmetrics intend to measure scholarly impact that is not necessarily captured by traditional, citation based metrics. These measures are mostly derived from the Web and social media. Altmetrics have already started to become a part of today’s scholarly communication and the measurement of its impact. Scientific journals are increasingly providing the number of tweets, Facebook likes and Mendeley readers as well as other social media mentions. At the same time, researchers begin to present altmetrics in their CVs and universities and funders are starting to consider the use of social media metrics to better understand the impact of their scientific output. However, the particular meaning, usefulness and validity of the different metrics is still not fully understood. Against this background, we particularly invite contributors and workshop participants to discuss the validity and meaning of social media metrics in scholarly context.
The goal of this year’s workshop is to provide a platform to present scholarly research related to altmetrics. The main goal of the workshop is to improve the understanding of altmetrics and their underlying social media platforms, technological challenges, various biases involved in data, as well as pitfalls and possibilities of these new metrics.
The workshop invites contributions on altmetrics research with particular focus on the following topics:
conceptualization and theoretical framework(s) for altmetrics;
critical reflection of altmetrics;
altmetrics data: sources, quality and problems;
techniques for collecting, monitoring, retrieving and visualizing altmetric data and measures;
relation between altmetrics and big data;
meaning, possibilities and limitations of altmetrics in research evaluation contexts;
relationship and complementarity of altmetrics with other measures of research impact (e.g. bibliometrics and peer review); and
disciplinary, temporal, institutional and individual case studies involving altmetric indicators.
This workshop is a follow-up to the successful altmetrics11 and altmetrics12 workshops held at previous ACM Web Science conferences (Koblenz, 2011 & Evanston, 2012). It will encourage collaboration and cross-pollination between research and practice, combining academic paper presentations with group discussions.