NISO Awarded Sloan Foundation Grant to Develop Standards or Recommended Practices for Altmetrics

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is undertaking a new two-phase project to study, propose, and develop community-based standards and recommended practices in the field of alternative metrics. Assessment of scholarship is a critical component of the research process, impacting everything from which projects get funded to who gains promotion and tenure to which publications gain prominence. Since Eugene Garfield’s pioneering work in the 1960s, much of the work on research assessment has been based upon citations, a valuable measure but one that has failed to keep pace with online reader behavior, network interactions with content, social media, and online content management. Exemplified by innovative new platforms and products, a new movement is growing to develop more robust alternative metrics—called altmetrics—that complement traditional citation metrics. The project is funded through a $207,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. NISO will first hold several in-person and virtual meetings within the community to identify the critical areas where altmetrics standards or recommended practices are needed. This will be followed by a second phase of convening a working group to develop the consensus standards and/or recommended practices prioritized in the community meetings.

Citation analysis lacks ways to measure the newer and more prevalent ways that articles generate impact such as through social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook, or blogs. Additionally, new forms of scholarly outputs, such as datasets, software tools, algorithms, or molecular structures are now commonplace, but they are not easily—or if at all— assessed by traditional citation metrics. These are among two of the many concerns the growing movement around altmetrics is trying to address.

