Title:
What is Altmetrics? The impact of Altmetrics on San Matteo researchers and on
librarians’ professional life.
Authors:
Valeria Scotti ¹, Annalisa De Silvestri ², Alberto Perlini ¹, Anna Balduini ¹, Funda Topuz ¹, Moreno
Curti ¹
¹Center for Scientific Documentation, Fondazione IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo, Pavia, Italy
²Service of Biometry & Statistics Unit, Fondazione IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo, Pavia, Italy
Corresponding author: Valeria Scotti, v.scotti@smatteo.pv.it
Introduction: Altmetrics is gaining increasing interest in the scientific community, with scientists
more concerned about research impact on society.
Aims: Our purposes are to understand these new metrics, acknowledge how they work and assess
their validity on research impact.
Methods: We explored the functionality of Impact Story and Altmetric.org tools.
Firstly we examined the correlation between IF and altmetrics score, as IF is currently used as a
measure for scientific production as well as a criterion for funding scientific activities by the
academy, hospitals and departments.
At researcher level, we calculated the Cohen Kappa concordance between Impact Story and WoS
identifying articles with the greatest impact.
Discussion: These new metrics resulted to be ‘user friendly’ and quite helpful for librarians and
researchers providing a valid measure of research impact on society. Regarding articles with the
greatest impact, a good agreement is shown at the researcher’s level between Impact Story and
WoS. Comparing the sum of altmetrics score and the sum of IFs related to all articles published in
2013 (calculated for each department of our Institution), a strongly high correlation has been
detected.
Conclusion: Altmetrics is useful and reliable, furthermore it could actually represent an interesting
relevant complement to citations.
Key words: altmetric; webometric; bibliometric.
(Max 5 key words, MeSH terms)