After posting the access metrics for VoaSMF , Egon Willighagen suggested that we also use some of the new alternative metrics (“altmetrics”). There’s more than one such effort and they are to be welcomed (citation metrics by themselves are inefficient, imprecise and suffer huge timelag). So people such as Egon, Heather Piwowar, Cameron Neylon are creating immediate metrics – literally hour-by hour. Here we show “Total Impact” (http://total-impact.org/).
Before we show the figures let me commend this and similar efforts because:
- They are not tied to a commercial business. (Journal Impact factors have long been tainted with the suspicion that they are manipulated between aggregators and publishers. Not for the benefit of science, but in the near-meaningless struggle between journals for branding)
- They are immediate. Within hours of publication you can get alternative metrics.
- They are objective and democratic. Anyone can build tools to carry them out. It gives real scientists a say in how science is measured. I expect universities to give them the cold-shoulder for some time as they challenge the current trivial system and they are free.
- They are multivariate. A whole host of different metrics can be used. You can make your own up.
The altmetrics software was originally hacked at a workshop that Cameron ran, I think. Anyway it is typical of the quality and speed that can be achieved by people working together with a common vision and shared tools. Indeed (I hope) this shows the challenge to the lumbering publication systems that publishers build and force us to use. We are starting to liberate our expressiveness.
So here are our 15 articles and I comment later:
report for Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future
download data
run update updated 15 Nov, 2011 created 15 Nov, 2011 15 artifacts
Permalink: http://total-impact.org/report.php?id=CXtjIzcopy
article
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-36
- Wilbanks (2011) Openness as infrastructure J Cheminf.
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50
tweets
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8
influential tweets
- 5
shares
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2
bookmarks
- 1
likes
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-35
- Neylon (2011) Three stories about the conduct of science: Past, future, and present J Cheminf.
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2
tweets
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1
influential tweets
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-34
- Zaharevitz (2011) Adventures in public data J Cheminf.
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1
tweets
Dataset [there is a bug, these should be labelled “article”]
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-39
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Townsend JA, Murray-Rust P (2011) CMLLite: a design philosophy for CML. J Cheminform. 21999395
all available metrics are zero.
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-38
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Adams S, de Castro P, Echenique P, Estrada J, Hanwell MD, Murray-Rust P, Sherwood P, Thomas J, Townsend JA (2011) The Quixote project: Collaborative and Open Quantum Chemistry data management in the Internet age. J Cheminform. 21999363
all available metrics are zero.
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-37
- O’Boyle NM, Guha R, Willighagen EL, Adams SE, Alvarsson J, Bradley JC, Filippov IV, Hanson RM, Hanwell MD, Hutchison GR, James CA, Jeliazkova N, Lang AS, Langner KM, Lonie DC, Lowe DM, Pansanel J, Pavlov D, Spjuth O, Steinbeck C, Tenderholt AL, Theisen KJ, Murray-Rust P (2011) Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards in chemistry: The Blue Obelisk five years on. J Cheminform. 21999342
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5
bookmarks
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1
blogs
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1
mentions
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-48
- Murray-Rust P (2011) Semantic science and its communication – a personal view. J Cheminform. 21999715
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1
bookmarks
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-46
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Rzepa HS (2011) The past, present and future of Scientific discourse. J Cheminform. 21999632
all available metrics are zero.
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-47
- Jones R, Macgillivray M, Murray-Rust P, Pitman J, Sefton P, O’Steen B, Waites W (2011) Open Bibliography for Science, Technology, and Medicine. J Cheminform. 21999661
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4
bookmarks
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-44
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Murray-Rust P, Rzepa HS (2011) CML: Evolution and Design. J Cheminform. 21999549
all available metrics are zero.
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-45
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Brooks BJ, Thorn AL, Smith M, Matthews P, Chen S, O’Steen B, Adams SE, Townsend JA, Murray-Rust P (2011) Ami – The Chemist’s Amanuensis. J Cheminform. 21999587
all available metrics are zero.
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-42
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Murray-Rust P, Adams SE, Downing J, Townsend JA, Zhang Y (2011) The semantic architecture of the World-Wide Molecular Matrix (WWMM). J Cheminform. 21999475
all available metrics are zero.
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-43
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Murray-Rust P, Townsend JA, Adams SE, Phadungsukanan W, Thomas J (2011) The semantics of Chemical Markup Language (CML): dictionaries and conventions. J Cheminform. 21999509
all available metrics are zero.
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-40
- Jessop DM, Adams SE, Murray-Rust P (2011) Mining chemical information from Open patents. J Cheminform. 21999425
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2
bookmarks
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10.1186/1758-2946-3-41
- Jessop DM, Adams SE, Willighagen EL, Hawizy L, Murray-Rust P (2011) OSCAR4: a flexible architecture for chemical text-mining. J Cheminform. 21999457
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1
bookmarks
More detail on available metrics. Missing some artifacts or metrics? See current limitations.
an 
project.
source code on github
There are at least 6 metrics:
- Tweets
- Blogs (a limited selection)
- Bookmarks (Cite-U-Like)
- Wikipedia entries
- Facebook shares and likes
- Mentions
Most are sparsely populated – the exception being JohnW’s tweets. These are real – the twittersphere resounded on day with a massive list of tweets about John’s article. There are some technical issues – some metrics currently require DOIs, etc.
People may argue that these metrics can be gamed. (Of course John pulled people off the streets of SF to tweet his article.) Seriously I think the accesses are reasonably accurate and haven’t been gamed AFAIK. The altmetrics don’t visit enough blogs, I think but that will come.
The point is that rather than waiting 3 years to find out if anyone has read our articles we get a current picture. It doesn’t surprise me that there are hundreds of accesses for each tweet or blog – we’ve had 300,000 downloads of Chem4Word and hardly a squeak. And most cheminformaticians don’t tweet or blog or show themselves in the glare of Open social networks.
Thanks to the altmetricians for their efforts.
P.