Impact Beyond Citation: An Introduction to Altmetrics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A fundamental concern for higher education institutions worldwide is improving their efectiveness and efficiency. #is is often expressed as a need to maximise the "impact" of funded research. "Impact" is intended to mean the e!ects of research beyond the research community, and may include in$uence on policy, improvements in health and living standards, cultural enrichment or an improved environment. Di!erent forms of impact – and the framework by which impact is assessed and rewarded – should depend on the mission and goals of the institution. In a political environment that places high value on transparency, accountability and demonstrable return-from-investment, and with intensifying competition in global higher education, universities are under pressure to provide evidence of the value of services they provide. While the value of teaching services has been straightforward to measure, this has not been the case for research. #e commercial publishing sector provides citation-based analysis – the ISI Impact Factor – that is the dominant metric for research evaluation. But the ISI Impact Factor's methodology, equitability and ability to measure the range of scholarship have been criticised. The Altmetrics movement, a body of scholars that seeks to create tools allowing scholarship to be measured and tracked in novel ways, is challenging the ISI Impact Factor. The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme investigated "alternative methodologies for a more Afrocentric approach to research evaluation".
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.025 | 0.067 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".