Ranking Journals Using Altmetrics
Slides for talk given at ISSI 2015 - 15th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference in Istanbul on 30th June 2015.
Paper associated with this talk is in proceedings and on arXiv as arXiv:1507.00451 (link below). The paper had the following abstract.
The rank of a journal based on simple citation information is a popular measure. The simplicity and availability of rankings such as Impact Factor, Eigenfactor and SciMago Journal Rank based on trusted commercial sources ensures their widespread use for many important tasks despite the well-known limitations of such rankings.
In this paper we look at an alternative approach based on information on papers from social and mainstream media sources. Our data comes from altmetric.com who identify mentions of individual academic papers in sources such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and news outlets.
We consider several different methods to produce a ranking of journals from such data. We show that most (but not all) schemes produce results which are roughly similar, suggesting that there is a basic consistency between social media based approaches and traditional citation based methods. Most ranking schemes applied to one data set produce relatively little variation and we suggest this provides a measure of the uncertainty in any journal rating. At the same time the differences we find between data sources shows they are capturing different aspects of journal impact. We conclude a small number of such ratings will provide the best information on journal impact.
