Measuring the impact of content

The role of Librarians is always put to test by emerging technologies, especially in the information technology. No one can go through every content to test its quality but by being a well-tested professional in the field of information we should accept the challenges in tracing the methods to adopt to test the unknown water.

In the ever burgeoning information ecosystem we sometimes bite the bullet by following the traditional methods. For some years we are continuously getting amazed by the rapid developments in shape and form of resources being supplied to us, but we are bit slower in changing the methods or processes we usually use to sift through them.

Moreover rapid changes in the web technologies facilitated by the semantic algorithms nowadays pushing us for a change from the traditional methods of assessing the importance of a scholarly content. Slowness and coverage limits of peer review process, limited emphasis, context and reason independent processes in citation indexing (Hirsch Index) and above all the market making Journal Impact Factor of journals all adding fuel to the flame.

Alternative Metrics

Scientists and scholars are now using new technologies and techniques to publish or update their work (completed or in progress). Social media applications (Facebook), micro blogging applications (Twitter), Online reference managers like Zotero, CiteULike, Mendeley, institutional repositories, personal blogs… etc are acting as better tools for their purpose. In a sense it is undoubtedly providing them the visibility and reach they dreamed off. Traditional filters like citation analysis, peer review and JIF are handicapped to search in this new information arena or they were not programmed to. There comes the new technology with added algorithm to sort out the impact in this diverse ecosystem.

Altmetrics uses semantic technologies, user usage patterns (book marking, tagging..), crowd sourcing for review purposes…etc and it harvests the content from diverse medias that varies from full fledged articles in journals to nanopublications in blogs or social medias. It enables altmetrics to track the impact of influential but uncited works and even impact outside the core subject area of the scholarly work. Instead of sending vast table of contents in the traditional systems it sends significant feeds for the user to get informed quickly.

In a way its an alternative way to measure the good among diverse sources which others have not tested yet.

Have a good day

Subeesh A C

Pune

Ref: http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/