11.1 Building Altmetrics Services at HULib: Challenges and Opportunities

This paper and presentation covers the results of an ongoing altmetrics pilot project at  Helsinki University Library (HULib). Our goal is finding out whether existing bibliometrics services offered by HULib could be complemented by an altmetrics-based research visibility tracking service. We are especially interested in evaluating this approach for research in the humanities and social sciences (SSH) as bibliometrics for these fields are not an established practice compared to the natural and life sciences. Tracking societal impact via altmetrics would make our metrics services more well rounded across disciplines and highlight elements unreachable by traditional bibliometrics.

After evaluating common commercial altmetrics software platforms, PlumX was chosen in 2015 to be the back end of the project. During the same year, we enlisted volunteer researchers from all four Helsinki University campuses to participate by having their publications added to a public visibility profile. Our work started with researchers representing several fields such as astronomy, communication studies, computer science, gender studies, medicine and veterinary medicine.

Our findings have been somewhat surprising. Altmetrics is often lauded as being ideal to complement traditional bibliometric analyses, but in this case it tended to follow established metrics´ norms and limitations rather than enrich them. In local SSH research publishing in Finnish is still common and its digital footprints such as social media posts, blogs and news articles are mostly in local media outlets. These were not adequately covered by PlumX. In sciences and related fields we encountered the opposite: the system generally functioned well and there were numerous examples where the data enriched traditional citation-based metrics. Feedback from participants echoed these findings.

The central challenges we face are how altmetrics can be used to cover the differing publication cultures and especially publications in languages outside the lingua francas. Another important aspect concerns communication practices: as altmetrics is based on tracking digital markings such as ORCID numbers, DOI addresses and hashtags, it is imperative that these are used consistently not only in scholarly but also in mainstream media communications.

Altmetrics also links with the open access movement as widely available publications enjoy a much larger general audience and are easier to link to in mainstream media. As the citations that we track mostly come from established peer-reviewed journals, they tend to appear much more slowly. Societal impact on the other hand begins almost instantly after publication. This central altmetrics tenet was well supported in our findings: it was common that articles had high levels of societal impact before equivalent citation counts.

University libraries are among key organisations in developing robust altmetrics services. This opportunity should not be missed. In our experience emphasis is needed in marketing, maintaining co-operation within the academic community and technical development in particular regarding data coverage and quality. We are looking forward to expanding our new service to even more fields this year. Ironically for now it seems that fields that traditionally benefit from bibliometrics will also gain the most out of altmetrics.

Dr Susanna Nykyri works as an information specialist in Helsinki University Library (HULib), Research Services. In 2010, she completed her PhD in LIS (thesis titled ‘Equivalence and Translation Strategies in Multilingual Thesaurus Construction’). Prior to working with bibliometrics, research data and open access and teaching at the HULib Research Services, she was involved in developing the Finto-service in the National Library of Finland, worked for the Finnish Social Science Data Archive on the European metadata project LIMBER, as a university teacher and as a post-doc researcher in information studies at Åbo Akademi University. She is a specialist in bibliometrics, altmetrics, multilingual content management, open linked data and indexing and tagging. She acts as editor-in-chief of the Finnish scientific journal Informaatiotutkimus and as Vice-Chair of the Finnish Research Library Association (STKS).

Valtteri Vainikka also works as an information specialist in Helsinki University Library (HULib) Research Services. His main task is to make bibliometric and altmetric analyses and to teach several candidate, master as well as doctoral level courses provided by HULib. He also acts as a subject specialist for computer science. His main interests are tool and method development in research services and teaching. Already an MA, he is currently working with his doctoral dissertation, which focuses on bibliometric methods.