The Social Mediums are kind of metrics wonks. The work of promotion and social engagement can seem very *squishy* if you can’t measure your impact and figure out what’s working and what’s not. Increasingly, as scholarship moves online it’s becoming harder to aggregate the impact of all the ways research can be shared. This article describes a new toolkit that helps people do this and puts it into a very attractive page (take a look at this sample here: https://profiles.impactstory.org/u/0000-0002-4517-1562 ). Think of it like CV for your research’s digital impact. It’s pretty impressive – The Social Mediums
In recent years, many researchers in the academy have tried to find more substantive–or, at the very least, *different*–ways to measure the impact of research than impact factor. This effort, as many folks will know, is usually summed up as “altmetrics.” While this proliferation of measures has helped scholars understand more fully the reach of their work, it can also be difficult to know whether a metric is appropriate for evaluating work, or even just to recognize differences among different metrics.
To ameliorate this problem, this week Robin Champieux (Oregon Health & Science University), Heather Coates (IUPUI), and Stacy Konkiel (Altmetric) have formally launched the Metrics Toolkit, which “provides evidence-based information about research metrics across disciplines, including how each metric is calculated, where you can find it, and how each should (and should not) be applied,” along with “examples of how to use metrics in grant applications, CVs, and promotion dossiers.” And it has a Creative Commons license, so it’s easy to share, use, or adapt to your campus.
The Metrics Toolkit currently offers information on measurements from the Altmetric Attention Score through Wikipedia citations, providing for each measurement the following schema: name; can apply to; metric definition (narrative); metric calculation (quantitative); data sources used; appropriate use cases; limitations; inappropriate use cases; available sources; transparency; an official website, if applicable; and a timeframe of coverage.
It’s a handy resource, and one that has great potential to become even more useful over time. Check out the Metrics Toolkit, and follow the project on Twitter!
Flickr photo “Metric” by Flickr user Christina Welsh / Creative Commons licensed BY-ND-2.0
Source: Introducing the Metrics Toolkit
