Developing Standards for Emerging Forms of Assessment: The NISO Altmetrics Initiative

Abstract

New types of calculation methodologies, called altmetrics, which is short for alternative metrics, are increasingly being used to measure and analyze the scholarly communication networks of researchers, librarians, publishers and funding organizations. By applying altmetrics to emergent online forums like Twitter, Academia.edu, Mendeley and ResearchGate, studies have shown that early measures of social attention to a work or body of work can be correlated with later usage and citation statistics to predict the diffusion and impact of research output. However, standards for altmetrics are needed to build confidence and trust among the information community.