Roland Fischer fragt auf snf.ch im Artikel «What if we let social media rate research?«, ob sich Social Media zur Messung des Einflusses eines wissenschaftlichen Artikels eignen:
«Altmetric is currently the most successful at offering so-called alternative metrics, or ‘altmetrics’ for short, hence the name of the company. These metrics go one step further than just adding up citations, by including all sorts of other kinds of freely available success indicators for research articles. They especially cover social networks. In other words, they count the numbers of downloads, tweets, Facebook entries, blog posts and media reports.
Altmetrics are supposed to be able to measure the scientific and societal impact of a research publication more precisely and more comprehensively. They’re also allegedly swifter at proving the success of a research publication. If people tweet about a new research article, for example, a discussion will get off the ground far quicker than in a specialist journal. (…)
In a recent publication, Stefanie Haustein has raised several questions about the relevance and robustness of these new evaluation methods. She showed that scientific publications have a rather low-level presence on digital channels – while 21.5 percent of papers get a tweet, less than five percent are shared on Facebook and only two percent are mentioned in blogs. Against this we have to consider the 66.8 percent that are cited at least once in the traditional manner.»