Do altmetrics work for assessing research quality?

Abstract

Alternative metrics (aka altmetrics) are gaining increasing interest in the scientometrics community as they can capture both the volume and quality of attention that a research work receives online. Nevertheless, there is limited knowledge about their effectiveness as a mean for measuring the impact of research if compared to traditional citation-based indicators. This work aims at rigorously investigating if any correlation exists among indicators, either traditional (i.e. citation count and h-index) or alternative (i.e. altmetrics) and which of them may be effective for evaluating scholars. The study is based on the analysis of real data coming from the National Scientific Qualification procedure held in Italy by committees of peers on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research.

References in corpus (3)

• Do altmetrics correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective
• Do altmetrics correlate with the quality of papers? A large-scale empirical study based on F1000Prime data
• Testing bibliometric indicators by their prediction of scientists promotions

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The practice of self-citations: a longitudinal study
• Using altmetrics for detecting impactful research in quasi-zero-day time-windows: the case of COVID-19
• Does the Venue of Scientific Conferences Leverage their Impact? A Large Scale study on Computer Science Conferences
• Do open citations give insights on the qualitative peer-review evaluation in research assessments? An analysis of the Italian National Scientific Qualification