Interpreting "altmetrics": viewing acts on social media through the lens of citation and social theories

1. Introduction More than 30 years after Blaise Cronin's seminal paper (Cronin, 1981; see reprint in this book) the metrics community is once again in need of a new theory, this time one for so-called " altmetrics ". Altmetrics, short for alternative (to citation) metrics —and as such a misnomer— refers to a new group of metrics based (largely) on social media events relating to scholarly communication. The term originated on 29 September 2010 in a tweet by Jason Priem in which he uttered his preference for the word altmetrics in the context of various metrics provided for PLOS journal articles: " I like the term #articlelevelmetrics, but it fails to imply *diversity* of measures. Lately, I'm liking #altmetrics. " (Priem, 2010). Although Priem is responsible for coining the term, the idea of measuring broader scientific impact through the web and had been discussed by Cronin and others (e. see also Thelwall's chapter in this book) in the context of webometrics years before: Scholars may be cited formally, or merely mentioned en passant in listservs and others electronic discussion fora, or they may find that they have been included in reading lists or electronic syllabi. Polymorphous mentioning is likely to become a defining feature of Web-based scholarly communication. (Cronin et al., 1998) There will soon be a critical mass of web-based digital objects and usage statistics on which to Priem —co-author of the altmetrics manifesto (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylon, 2010) and co-founder of ImpactStory 1 , an online tool aggregating various metrics on the researcher level— and colleagues argued that metrics based on 'traces' of use and production of scholarly output on social media platforms could help to improve scholarly communication and research evaluation. The term altmetrics was introduced out of the need to differentiate these new metrics from traditional citation-based indicators, which the altmetrics movement is seeking to replace or use as an alternative. The altmetrics manifesto and other work by Priem and colleagues appeal to the scientific community and research managers to " value 1 https://impactstory.org/ 2 all research products " (Piwowar, 2013), not just journal articles, and to measure impact in a broader sense by looking at more than just citations. The manifesto lists various sources of new metrics that would complement and replace traditional forms of publication, peer review, and citation analysis (Priem et al., 2010). Priem (2014) claimed that with scholarship moving online, former …