Altmetrics

Last night's class was on Altmetrics. We had a very enthusiastic guest speaker, Ms Natasha Langdown, who is the  Chief Information Officer at South African Medical Research Council. She is currently doing a PhD at University of Western Cape,  with altmetrics as her topic. 

Natasha had a wealth of information to share. I was very excited about the presentation because although it is a topic which I am familiar with, I felt I had limited knowledge about it. I always find it more interesting  listening to an expert about a topic than reading about it, and this was indeed the case. She knows her topic well and explained that her interest in Altmetrics grew from her love of social media. 

 
Powerpoint by: Natasha Langdown

Altmetrics  was proposed in 2010, as an alternative to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and the h-index. It is a new way of measuring research.  In the context of academic research, Altmetrics  measure the impact of an article by how many mentions appear in social media (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.). We were introduced to tools available to librarians and the exciting options that we have as professionals to play a role in  supporting research with altmetric tools.

 

Image:  https://www.altmetric.com/support/

So today I viewed my Twitter page and decided that it's definitely in need of some professional change. For the next few days I am going to think of ways to incorporate these tools into my job as a faculty librarian.