SpotOn London 2012: Altmetrics beyond the Numbers
Channel: SpotOnLondonTools
Date: 11/11/2012

Altmetrics look at the impact that research is having in the social web. They go beyond citations of scholarly papers, and also include usage statistics, sharing in social bookmarking sites, discussions on Twitter and Facebook, and mentions in science blogs and Wikipedia. Much of the discussion about altmetrics has focussed on the numbers collected by these tools, but their real value is in helping explore what happens after a paper (or other piece of research) is published, and how it is absorbed into the body of knowledge. In this session we will take a few examples as a starting point to highlight how altmetrics tools can help in this process. In the discussion we hopefully hear more interesting examples, but will also find time to talk about how the existing tools can be improved to go beyond collecting numbers and help tell great stories.