from tweetations to citations: social media and the researcher

latrobe.edu.au CRICOS Provider 00115M

The Researcher Conundrum: Managing your profile, citation analysis, social media and altmetrics!

Sharon Karasmanis s.karasmanis@latrobe.edu.auFaculty Librarian and Team Leader (Health Sciences)Library Research Forum 25 October 2013

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Presentation Outline:

1. Managing your Profile

2. Social Media

3. Altmetrics – measuring impact of social media

4. Future Directions and Ideas to support researchers!

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1. Managing your profile – what are the issues?

• Measure your research impact via citation analysis – a widely accepted measure

• Important to be aware of the scope of all citation tools, as no one tool will measure all publications

• tool needs to index your publication as well as all citing publications!

• Metrics are not as well established in some disciplines such as the arts, humanities, social sciences & business

• H-index - a common measure depends on the length of time publishing and on the tool used

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Managing your profile - benefits of using profiling tools:

• Measure your personal research effectiveness

• Grant applications

• Promotion and recruitment

• Benchmarking

• Performance evaluation

• Identify potential collaborators

• Identify emerging areas of research

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Citation Analysis tools: available via Library databases

• Author profiles automatically generated:

• Scopus: world’s largest citation database of peer-reviewed literature, has smart tools to track analyse and visualise research; medical, technical and social science databases

• Web of Science: key provider of citation info, includes high impact journals in sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities

• InCites: analyses institutional productivity and benchmarks your output against peers worldwide; access customised citation data, global metrics etc uses Web of Science data

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Free profiling sites:

• Google Scholar – track citations, compute citation metrics, set up a profile, update article information, follow new citations and set up alerts.

• Publish or Perish uses Google Scholar data and provides a more extensive range of metrics and statistics.

• Very useful for disciplines not well covered by Scopus and Web of Science latrobe.libguides.com/citationanalysis

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Research profiling and networking sites:

• Research Gate: connect and follow collaborators peers, co-authors and competitors! LTU 961 members, 7127 papers (at 24.10.13)

• Microsoft Academic Search: create profile to display citation metrics and show relationship between and among disciplines, content and authors. LTU 3,416 authors, last 5 years 1,702 authors (at 24.10.13)

• Academia.edu: share and follow research, provides analytics, follow others in your field. LTU 737 authors (at 24.10.13)

• BiomedExperts: literature-based scientific professional network that brings the right researchers together LTU 261 authors (at 24.10.13)

• LinkedIn: world’s largest professional network (useful if you don’t have a personal website)

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The Conundrum!

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Which tool is best?

• Discuss with colleagues, some tools are discipline specific.

• Understand where prominent authors in your field are operating – what tools are they using?

• Sometimes multiple tools are necessary!

• Ensure you understand what each tool will provide, does it suit your requirements?

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2. Can social media enhance my research impact?

• Social media outlets now becoming essential for researchers

• Fast becoming primary vehicle for research development and research impact

• Real time environment

• Can promote research article before the ‘ink is dry’!

• Understanding your own research community is critical – where are they posting?

• Use social media to enrich your working life and in a way that provides added value

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New to Twitter or Social Media?

• Be judicious about who you follow (to reduce useless tweets clogging up your feed) - be selective on what you tweet or retweet!

• Build up your followers, invite friends, add a ‘Follow’ button to your website - promote your Twitter profile via email signature

• Get the most out of Twitter, follow hashtags to stay current in areas of interest: #openaccesslibrary

• If you aren’t using Twitter or social media, it’s critical to understand that competitors are!

• www.twitter.com

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Add Value to your Research Project: 1. Tweet about each new publication, website

update or blog

2. Ensure that all tweeted publications are online! (University research repository can help? )

3. Use hashtags to make materials more visible

4. ‘Crowd source’ research activities

5. Connect with practitioners in government, business and public policy

6. Use Twitter monthly as a painless metric to assess effectiveness. Mollett, A., Moran, D. & Dunleavy, P. (2011)

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SlideShare - www.slideshare.net/

• Upload conference or other presentations and build followers around your research - then tweet it!

• Weekly email reports on views and downloads

• Used in LibGuides, great way of sharing research, and creating teaching resources

• One of the top social media tools alongside Twitter, YouTube and Facebook!

• blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/07/26/

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Social Media – Benefits!

• Connect and collaborate build your virtual community!

• Career and brand building

• Real time impact, indications for future citations

• Track impact and reach of articles

• Discover trending topics and themes

• Identify possible collaborators

• Promote awareness of new research

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3. Measuring social media activities - Altmetrics

• Altmetrics can be used to measure how scholarly articles are being shared, used and discussed in social media e.g. blog posts, tweets

• Does not substitute citation counts or the h-index, but complements established article-level metric tools

• Traditional metric tools are limited in that it may take years for citations to appear

• More and more researchers are turning to social media metric tools

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Some publishers have incorporated Altmetrics, or are compatible with the Altmetric bookmarklet

• arXIV.org, BioMed Central, BMJ, HighWire, Nature Publishing, PLoS, PubMed and Scopus:

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Altmetrics Bookmarklet: altmetric.com/bookmarklet.php

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More tools to track and display Altmetrics:

• ImpactStory - Altmetric.com - Plum Analytics – Peer Evaluation - Reader Meter - Research Score

• ImpactStory to develop more robust alternative metrics

• Benefits of Altmetrics:

• Openness: largely based on open data

• Speed: nearly real-time metrics of scholarly impact

• Diversity of sources: variety of domains

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Considerations for Researchers and Managers:

• Critical to understand that competitors can be using Altmetrics to build their profiles

• Research evaluators need to be explicit about the methods used to measure impact

• Need to have a clear understanding of potential pitfalls when using this data for any purpose, especially where data quality and consistency is essential, as the following can vary:

Data collection techniques and timing, Data collection differs by tracking tool, Data collection inconsistencies

• Chamberlain, S. (2013)

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In Conclusion: How does social media enhance traditional publishing?

• Provides instant awareness of research papers

• Forum for online discussion of research output

• Opportunity for networking and research visibility

• Instant communication via virtual environments

• Self-reporting of altmetrics as part of grant applications, promotion or employment!

• Researchers may be drawn to a paper with a large number of tweets or blog mentions!

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Future Directions

• National Information Standards Organisation (NISO)

• To develop Standards and Recommended Practices for altmetrics

• Need to keep pace with reader behaviour

• As article-level metrics rise in popularity, possible research in this field could ask:

• What is the role of Twitter in the life cycle of a paper? Can tweets predict citations? How do different article-level metrics relate to one another?

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Some ideas!

• Consider setting up a social media group in your department or school

• Once your paper is accepted for publication, add to University repository, then tweet the link:

• Instant online publication!

• Check out the literature and user guides

• Consider an online profiling strategy

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• LTU Marketing – Social Media guidelines and help!

• intranet.latrobe.edu.au/marketing

• Faculty Librarian:

• latrobe.edu.au/library/contact-us/

• LibGuides:

• latrobe.libguides.com/citationanalysis

• latrobe.libguides.com/journalimpact

• latrobe.libguides.com/dataman

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References:Chamberlain, S. (2013). Consuming article-level metrics: observations and lessons from

comparing aggregator provider data. Information Standards Quarterly, 25(2), 4-13.

Christoph, N., & Hans-Dieter, D. (2008). Data sources for performing citation analysis: an overview. Journal of Documentation, 64(2), 193-210. doi:10.1108/00220410810858010

Eysenbach, G. (2011). Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. Journal of medical Internet research, 13(4), e123. doi:10.2196/jmir.2012

The Maze of impact metrics. (2013). Nature , 502(7471), 271.

Mollett, A., Moran, D., & Dunleavy, P. (2011). Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities: a guide for academics and researchers, blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/07/26/a-to-z-of-social-media-for-academia/ accessed 20 October 2013

Roemer, R.C. & Borchardt, R. (201 scholar3). From bibliometrics to altmetrics: a changing scholarly landscape. C&RL News, http://m.crln.acrl.org/content/73/10/596.full accessed 23 October 2013.