Social Media and Altmetrics

This chapter describes the relationship between social media and altmetrics. It briefly discusses how social media platforms’ features can create altmetrics and why this is in line with the concept of “affordances”. Since altmetrics are built on the data that is derived from user activities on social media platforms, the affordances of these platforms are important for the development of altmetrics. Affordances produce meaning and control the behavior of users that interact with such platforms. Although social media platforms are not necessarily targeted at researchers, the features of these platforms often support the research enterprise. Therefore, this chapter also explains researchers’ social media engagement, such as the reasons some researchers use social media platforms on a daily basis. It also provides three classification approaches that aid the interpretation of altmetrics. Last but not least, it discusses the issues that influence the general adoption of altmetrics by focusing on the challenges social media platforms present to altmetrics

Affordance · Altmetrics · Data science · Human–computer interaction · Social media · World Wide Web · Complex Network Analysis Techniques · Computer Science · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · scientometrics and bibliometrics research

• From Research Evaluation to Research Analytics. The digitization of academic performance measurement

  Open Access•Anne K Krüger, Sabrina Petersohn•Valuation Studies•2022

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