Friday 21 February 2014

Altmetrics - Library Connect Webinar 20th Feb, 2014

This hour long webinar was very detailed and went into much detail about Impact Factors, how they are created, and whether there is a demand from author for this kind of information. The concept has been around for 5+ years now, and is slowly gaining ground, especially with those who want to trace the impact of their writings on the social web. (Twitter, Mendeley, blogs etc. - shares basically).

The argument is that online sharing does not invoke the same behaviours as traditional methods and consequently needs it's own set of metrics. There are different characteristics to the behaviours and these generate different data that that traditionally collated by impact factor generators, therefore creating the need for a new appriach to measuring impact > Altmetrics..
For example Elsevier clusters like kinds of activity for this type of reporting, rather then compressing all activities into one.

Definition

"Altmetrics are new metrics proposed as an alternative to the widely used journal impact factor and personal citation indices like the h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010,[1][2] as a generalization of article level metrics,[3] and has its roots in the twitter #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.[4] Altmetrics cover not just citation counts, but also other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, downloads, or mentions in social media and news media."

Image from : http://altmetrics.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/four-ways-to-measure-impact-copy.png

Leaders in the field include

Altmetrics
Plum
PLOS (code)
Impact story .org (free (plugs into Google Scholar My Citations)

Some of these interact with other services such as Vivo, Profiles, SciVal, Experts, and Figshare.

Altmetrics are starting to appear in subscription resources as sub products or reports.

Altmetrics are a way for crowd sourced / funded projects to measure their success in reaching their targets. They enable researchers to be able to assess whether they are reaching the right market / population with outreach and gives context to the research / paper.

Recent trend

Tweetable abstract submissions

Spaces to watch 

growkudos.com
ORCID
Counter (use in Institutional Repositories).

Read more at : http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

Monday 3 February 2014

Summon users day January 2014 - NCI

Highlights

Summon


  1. Serials Solutions is now part of ProQuest workflow solutions. 
  2. Attendees were reminded that widgets can be created based on several facets: discipline, content type etc.
  3. For example a widget could search for psychology content, or e-journals only. 
  4. Reference content for the third column on the results page can be pulled from Wikipedia, and Encyclopedia Britannica, Gale Reference is in the pipeline after which credo materials will be made available - all subscription based of course.  
  5. Library of Congress and other image archive pictures are now included in search results if enabled. See example for Ireland
  6. Refworks FLOW is now providing free individual accounts, however institutions need a subscription account to get details of their users usage. 
    1. Our patrons have been made aware of this. 
    2. My personal account exports beautifully from the saved folder on Summon into FLOW (select export to RefWorks)
      1. Very impressed. 
  7. An example of a library log in page outlining current issues with database access was shown and has inspired the addition of this type of information to the log in page for our new log in on the new web site design. 
  8. The inclusion of reviews and ratings from library thing and other content providers identified by our subscriptions on the title landing page has encouraged us to enable this feature. 
  9. Hathi Trust titles have been indexed to the full text level for Summon. This indexing allows matching for print versions of the same title, or electronic versions held at other online locations. This is a very exciting addition for us. 
  10. Issues with the indexing of EBSCO databases persist. 

Intota

I attended a presentation on Intota about 10 months ago, so these notes are just to cover the extraneous information to that post. It was pointed out that it is not an LMS replacement at this stage. 
A presentation on the functionality of Intota etc, was given. The service/product will not be available in the immediate future. 
Intota Assessment will be capable of a 5 year retrospective comparison using imported data from traditional LMS. 
Can assist with stock deselection, and journal coverage overlap analysis.
Electronic resource management populates license information into the patron interface.