Scholarly Tweets: Measuring Research Impact via Altmetrics

Abstract

[From the text} Social media metrics are becoming more pervasive in the information landscape, but to retain permanence altmetric products must focus on building trust with the researcher community. We trust Impact Factor (IF) citation metrics because of the transparency in their data collection and analysis. Altmetric tools need to acknowledge and guard against incidents of gaming and to present self-promotion activities separately in their analysis. As information specialists who teach and utilize IFs and citation metrics, we should also understand how altmetrics are calculated and how they can benefit our institutions and researchers.