Usage metrics versus altmetrics: confusing terminology? [Glänzel W, et al.]

Usagemetrics havealready been around much longer than altmetrics. In fact, usage metrics areeven older than citation metrics, because librarians have been tracking usagesince the beginning of their profession, ranging from basic user surveys to theusage tracking of physical journal issues and monographs to library loanstatistics to the sophisticated analysis of e-media usage (e-metrics).

With theadvent of electronic resources, particularly electronic journals, and theirincreasing acceptance, this resulted in a rapid change in the user preferenceespecially since 2002. Usage metrics have become increasingly popular inscientometric analyses beyond librarian practices. Analyses gradually shiftedfrom the local to the global level. As a result, usage metrics werereintroduced as an interesting alternative to traditional citation metrics,although they should rather be regarded as supplementary metrics.

The importanceof usage metrics has not only been stressed for journals, but new studies havealso suggested addressing not only views and downloads from e-books but alsoloan analyses for monographs.

The term ‘‘altmetrics’’was introduced later than ‘‘usage metrics’’.As the name suggests, they are also meant as an alternative to citationmetrics. In contrast to usage metrics they are based on the repercussion ofwhatsoever publications on the web, notably in social media, in contrast tousage metrics which, for so far, rely on e-content from publishers and otherinformation providers. The whole concept is still in its infancy, still lackingstandardization of what exactly and how this is all measured. Whereas usage metrics target downloadsand views, which are the most usual proxies for usage at present, evenif they rather measure the intention to use something than their actual usage, altmetrics comprise of anabundance of very heterogeneous indicators from mentions and captures,to links, bookmarks, storage, andconversations. Of course, many social media also include views anddownloads, but these are collected at different levels (often onlytool-specific) and have neither the same dimension nor the same relevance asglobal data from publishers and information providers or local data based onlibrary-licensed or archived e-content.

A cleardistinction between usage, citations and altmetrics is also made in the altmetricsmanifesto (http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/) or in the description of PLOSArticle-Level Metrics (ALMs; http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/).

One of thefuture challenges of scientometrics is to improve the quality and the extensionof the impact assessment when analyzing research performance. Citations are an acceptable andcorrect proxy for the measure of the publications impact, however, only for asubset of the scientific community, namely the ‘‘publish or perish’’ group andonly of the impact reflected by documented scholarly communication. Itis common knowledge that many disciplines address much broader audiences withinthe scholar community and even beyond (societal impact). Usage metrics andaltmetrics both allow the development of new indicators in order to gain a muchbroader and more complete picture of scientific communication.

Glänzel W, Gorraiz J. Usage metrics versus altmetrics: confusingterminology? Scientometrics, 2015, 102: 2161–2164

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