Usage metrics versus altmetrics: confusing terminology?

Recently an increasingly controversial discussion about the concepts of usage metrics and altmetrics got going at conferences and meetings in our field. While for a small group both concepts are clearly different, a large part of the community tends to regard usage metrics as a subset of altmetrics. From our point of view this use of terminology is not appropriate, and can easily lead to unnecessary confusion and misunderstandings reflected in a distorted scientific communication. In what follows we will argue why a distinction should be made between the two terms ‘usage metrics’ and ‘altmetrics’. The main reason is of historical nature. Usage metrics have already been around much longer than altmetrics. In fact, usage metrics are even older than citation metrics, because librarians have been tracking usage since the beginning of their profession, ranging from basic user surveys to the usage tracking of physical journal issues and monographs to library loan statistics to the sophisticated analysis of e-media usage (e-metrics). There is an abundance of statistics and models on library-related usage data, based on different sampling techniques, cumbersome procedures or comprehensive methods of gathering usage data for all subscribed publication types (Coombs 2005; Kraemer 2006; Franklin et al. 2009).