Do Altmetrics Work?

Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.

Thelwall M, Haustein S, Larivière V, Sugimoto CR (2013)

Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services 

PLoS ONE 8(5): e64841. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064841

When Dickens met Dostoevsky

by Eric Naiman (the co-editor, with Christina Kiaer, of Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the revolution inside, 2006, and the author, most recently of Nabokov, Perversely, 2010) in TLS:

• Dostoevsky was a prickly, often rude interlocutor. He and Turgenev hated each other
• Tomalin returned to her research notes and soon admitted that she might have been the victim of a hoax
• When Professor Andrews wrote to Ms Harvey, she responded that she had lost her notes, had a poor memory and had moved on to other topics
• So who was Stephanie Harvey, and why had she written her article?
• What was clear was Stephanie Harvey’s penchant for a distinct modus operandi
• Harvey has repeatedly focused his ire on several institutions, most notably the left-tilting British Academy
• This was not, however, the end of the connection between A. D. Harvey and Trevor McGovern
• Chekhov wrote a story where the father of a counterfeiter begins to worry that every coin passing through his hands is a fake
• Even for holders of tenured university positions, scholarship can make for a lonely life
• In other cases Harvey seems to have been operating as something of a vigilante
• The worst thing here, if they are fictitious, is a violation of the trust that remains a constitutive element of the humanities
• The discovery of this text marked the end of my pursuit . . . . Dickens and Dostoevsky were no longer in sight