Bibliometrics to Altmetrics and its impact on Social Media

Abstract

In the age of Web 2.0, individuals are strongly connected in the virtual worlds and form diverse online communities. Recently, the transmission of information in these online communities has gained much attention, partly because of the enormous popularity of online social networking sites and their potential marketing impact. The social media tools available on the internet assist the encouragement of science dramatically, and the change is happening in real time models. Expansion of World Wide Web and newer technologies has improved the ways in which science is communicated and its assessment techniques. The use of conventional metric tools judges the impact of scholarly publications using citation and download counts. They are broadly used to evaluate articles, authors, and disciplines on publishers' platforms. These tools analyze the citation data in normal course of time and make them available. A barrier to spreading of research is that it depends on the end-user searching for or ‘pulling’ relevant knowledge from the literature base. Social media instead ‘pushes’ relevant knowledge directly to the end-user, via blogs and sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The social media is very effective at improving and spreading seems well accepted, but, remarkably, there is no evidence to support this claim.