Guest editorial: social media in scholarly communication

摘要

The contributions in this Special Issue provide insights on social media activity related to scholars and scholarly content, as well as on the metrics that are based on these online events. After decades of studying scholarly communication almost exclusively with papers and citations, scholars now have access to new sources of evidence which, in turn, has brought new energy to the science indicators community. Several parallels can be drawn between the current state of research on social media metrics and the early days of citation analysis. In a manner similar to the altmetrics research community, the bibliometric community has historically been driven by data availability rather than by crafting indicators based on specific concepts. In that sense, both communities (which overlap to a certain extent) have been quite pragmatic. However, while citations had been a central and established component of scholarly communication since the early days of modern science, the role and uses of various social media platforms within and outside academe are still taking shape (Haustein et al, in press). At the same time, funders, universities, and publishers increasingly demand indicators of the impact of science on society.