The Meaning of Altmetrics

A range of quantitative methods are today widely used in research evaluation (e.g. Moed et al., 1985; Moed et al., 1995). Recently, with the increasing popularity of social media, and especially the increasing use of social media in scholarly activities, a new field of research has been introduced, namely altmetrics, to investigate the use of social media in research evaluation (Priem & Hemminger, 2010). Although altmetrics does not yet have a widely accepted definition, the idea with altmetrics is that the mentions and other indicators of visibility and awareness a research article and other research products get in social media could tell something about the impact or influence of that research. Earlier altmetric research have in fact found some indications that the social media visibility of a scientific article correlates with more traditional measures of research impact, such as citations, hinting at the value of altmetrics as a rapid source of data about research impact and its potential as a tool for research evaluation (e.g. Bar-Ilan et al., 2012; Mohammadi & Thelwall, 2013; Thelwall et al., 2013a). However, little research has focused on the underlying meaning and actual validity of altmetrics. Are altmetrics measures of impact of research and, if not, what do they measure? How is attention in social media created? Does visibility in social media mean the same thing as citation impact? This paper will review some of the earlier research on the topic and based on the earlier findings discuss challenges with altmetrics and the underlying meaning and validity of altmetrics.