Altmetrics as traces of the computerization of the research process

Introduction In the Altmetrics Manifesto published on the Web in October 2010, the concept of “Altmetrics” is introduced as follows: In growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web. Online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley each claim to store over 40 million articles (making them substantially larger than PubMed); as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a growing number tend scholarly blogs. These new forms reflect and transmit scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero–where we can see and count it. That hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks– now, we can listen in. The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository–now, we can track it. This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before. We call the elements of this trace altmetrics. (Priem et al., 2010). Online reference managers, social networking tools, scholarly blogs, and online repositories are highlighted as technological inventions, and their use by the scientific community or even the wider public leaves traces of impact of scientific activity. A leading commercial provider of such data, Altmetric.com, distinguishes four types of altmetric data sources (Altmetric.com, 2014):