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Abstract

One of the solutions to help scientists filter the most relevant publications and, thus, to stay current on developments in their fields during the transition from "little science" to "big science", was the introduction of citation indexing as a Wellsian "World Brain" (Garfield, 1964) of scientific information: It is too much to expect a research worker to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the bibliographic descendants of antecedent papers. It would not be excessive to demand that the thorough scholar check all papers that have cited or criticized such papers, if they could be located quickly. The citation index makes this check practicable (Garfield, 1955, p. 108). In retrospective, citation indexing can be perceived as a pre-social web version of crowdsourcing, as it is based on the concept that the community of citing authors outperforms indexers in highlighting cognitive links between papers, particularly on the level of specific ideas and concepts (Garfield, 1983). Over the last 50 years, citation analysis and more generally, bibliometric methods, have developed from information retrieval tools to research evaluation metrics, where they are presumed to make scientific funding more efficient and effective (Moed, 2006). However, the dominance of bibliometric indicators in research evaluation has also led to significant goal displacement (Merton, 1957) and the oversimplification of notions of "research productivity" and "scientific quality", creating adverse effects such as salami publishing, honorary authorships, citation cartels, and misuse of indicators (Binswanger, 2015; Cronin and Sugimoto, 2014; Frey and Osterloh, 2006; Haustein and Larivière, 2015; Weingart, 2005).
Furthermore, the rise of the web, and subsequently, the social web, has challenged the quasi-monopolistic status of the journal as the main form of scholarly communication and citation indices as the primary assessment mechanisms. Scientific communication is becoming more open, transparent, and diverse: publications are increasingly open access; manuscripts, presentations, code, and data are shared online; research ideas and results are discussed and criticized openly on blogs; and new peer review experiments, with open post publication assessment by anonymous or non-anonymous referees, are underway. The diversification of scholarly production and assessment, paired with the increasing speed of the communication process, leads to an increased information overload (Bawden and Robinson, 2008), demanding new filters. The concept of altmetrics, short for alternative (to citation) metrics, was created out of an attempt to provide a filter (Priem et al., 2010) and to steer against the oversimplification of the measurement of scientific success solely on the basis of number of journal articles published and citations received, by considering a wider range of research outputs and metrics (Piwowar, 2013). Although the term altmetrics was introduced in a tweet in 2010 (Priem, 2010), the idea of capturing traces - "polymorphous mentioning" (Cronin et al., 1998, p. 1320) - of scholars and their documents on the web to measure "impact" of science in a broader manner than citations was introduced years before, largely in the context of webometrics (Almind and Ingwersen, 1997; Thelwall et al., 2005):
There will soon be a critical mass of web-based digital objects and usage statistics on which to model scholars' communication behaviors - publishing, posting, blogging, scanning, reading, downloading, glossing, linking, citing, recommending, acknowledging - and with which to track their scholarly influence and impact, broadly conceived and broadly felt (Cronin, 2005, p. 196). A decade after Cronin's prediction and five years after the coining of altmetrics, the time seems ripe to reflect upon the role of social media in scholarly communication. This Special Issue does so by providing an overview of current research on the indicators and metrics grouped under the umbrella term of altmetrics, on their relationships with traditional indicators of scientific activity, and on the uses that are made of the various social media platforms - on which these indicators are based - by scientists of various disciplines.

Date

20. 1.2015 18:30:22