Validity of altmetrics data for measuring societal impact: A study using data from Altmetric and F1000Prime

摘要

Can altmetric data be validly used for the measurement of societal impact?The current study seeks to answer this question with a comprehensive dataset(about 100,000 records) from very disparate sources (F1000, Altmetric, and anin-house database based on Web of Science). In the F1000 peer review system,experts attach particular tags to scientific papers which indicate whether apaper could be of interest for science or rather for other segments of society.The results show that papers with the tag "good for teaching" do achieve higheraltmetric counts than papers without this tag - if the quality of the papers iscontrolled. At the same time, a higher citation count is shown especially bypapers with a tag that is specifically scientifically oriented ("new finding").The findings indicate that papers tailored for a readership outside the area ofresearch should lead to societal impact. If altmetric data is to be used forthe measurement of societal impact, the question arises of its normalization.In bibliometrics, citations are normalized for the papers' subject area andpublication year. This study has taken a second analytic step involving apossible normalization of altmetric data. As the results show there areparticular scientific topics which are of especial interest for a wideaudience. Since these more or less interesting topics are not completelyreflected in Thomson Reuters' journal sets, a normalization of altmetric datashould not be based on the level of subject categories, but on the level oftopics.