Altmetrics: Finding Meaningful Needles in the Data Haystack

Despite nearly 350 years of practice, we still do a fairly poor job of measuring the quality and impact of scholarly papers and the work of individual researchers. Much of our system for determining funding and career advancement revolves around one metric: the impact factor. Technology has progressed to a point where we can do better. We can now track the life of each individual paper after it has been published and better understand how it is read and how it is used. This creates a tremendous opportunity for new alternative metrics (“altmetrics”) to give us a much better sense of a paper's true impact. At the same time, we are now faced with an overwhelming quantity of information and seemingly unlimited ways to analyze a researcher's work. How do we separate out the digital needles from the haystack—the signal from the noise—and create useful tools for research assessment?