Altmetrics: what’s not to like?

Hang on, Ernesto! So you're saying that although this article mentions 'altmetrics' 19 times in all, it's not a very accurate account of altmetrics? And that "many readers will browse and mainly come across the image and caption--and move on" and hence that readers' browsing habits are not in fact a good way of measuring the intellectual content of a piece of writing. I think you'll find that those are precisely the arguments people use against metrics, 'alt' or otherwise, in the first place.

@gabriel sure. That doesn't make Ernesto's point any less valid though. :) Altmetrics isn't actually about the numbers as an end goal. It just has a misleading name. It covers anything that isn't citations, not just social media. Even if it *did* just cover social media, there's obviously value in looking there for supporting evidence of impact as well as 'traditional' outputs, as Ernesto says and as evidenced by things like the THE article from today I'm seeing being tweeted to the right: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/the-rules-of-twitter-engagement/2016034.article This kind of stuff came up at the conference fairly frequently, which is why the caption and image on this (otherwise good) piece are unfortunate. (disclosure: I'm the Euan quoted in the article)

I too am not too sure why THE would chose the image they have as they can be misleading to the content and ideas behind it. For anyone wanting a more in-depth review of the conference, I blogged about it here. http://scharrlibrary.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/1am-altmetrics-conference-review.html