Jason Priem is a doctoral student and Royster Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying how the Web is revolutionizing scholarly communication. Jason has been a leader in the altmetrics movement, investigating new measures of scholarly impact on the social Web, and also helps to lead the open-source total-impact project.

Date: Friday, November 16, 2012

Time: 1:30 pm - 3:00pm

Location: Patrick Lecture Hall - Plyler Hall

Scholarship is increasingly moving online. As it does, scholarly impacts once invisible are beginning to leave traces--things like conversation on twitter, saves in reference managers, discussion on blogs, citation on Wikipedia, and more. Observing these traces may inform alternative metrics, or "altmetrics," of scholarly impact. These altmetrics could help us track the influence of scholarship with unprecedented speed, breadth, and resolution. In particular, they help us move beyond the article, helping us value increasingly important and powerful new genres of scholarly products like blog posts, software, and datasets, and beyond the impact factor, letting us reward the observed impact of scholarly products themselves, across lots of different audiences and use types--not just awarding the prestige of where they're published. 

In this talk, Jason Priem will discuss the current research and practice around altmetrics, describe a framework to better understand what these metrics mean, and review extant tools that let scholars and evaluators gather their own altmetrics today.