Rise of 'altmetrics' and measuring impact of research

By Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Steven B Roberts's 103-page tenure package features the usual long-as-your-arm list of peer-reviewed publications. But Roberts, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies the effects of environmental change on shellfish, chose to add something less typical to his dossier – evidence of his research's impact online. This is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, America’s leading higher education publication. It is presented here under an agreement with University World News.
He listed how many people viewed his laboratory's blog posts, tweeted about his research group's findings, viewed his data sets on a site called Figshare, downloaded slides of his presentations from SlideShare, and otherwise talked about his lab's work on social media platforms. Read more...