Measuring research impact: bibliometrics, social media, altmetrics, and the BJGP.

Social media platforms such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and article reference managers such as Mendeley are now being used to communicate and discuss research. Alternative metrics (‘altmetrics’), first described by Priem and colleagues,1 is a term used to describe ‘web-based metrics for the impact of scholarly material with an emphasis on social media outlets as a source of data’.2 These article-level metrics are increasingly being used in conjunction with traditional bibliometric methods, such as the Impact Factor (IF), the immediacy index, and citation counts, to assess the impact of journals and journal articles and the outputs of individual researchers. A journal’s IF is calculated as the average number of times articles published in the past 2 years have been cited in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).3 The IF is not article specific, does not show the immediacy of the citation count, and may not be an appropriate or accurate means of assessing the overall impact of research in an article. The h-index4 is another measure that is frequently used to define an individual researcher’s citation records. There is a growing consensus that the IF as a single measure of quality is outdated. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)5 recommends the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics. It suggests that publishers should offer a range of performance measures to assess and evaluate scholarly output. Altmetrics have the potential to add another dimension to this. Traditional bibliometric analysis and peer review have formed the standard methods to assess the ‘scientific status of disciplines, research institutes and scientists’,6 and it is well known that unless the ‘discipline’ or research is published in a journal with a high IF then it may be ‘lost’. Databases such as PubMed and Thomson Reuters Web of Science …