Awareness of Altmetrics among LIS Scholars and Faculty

Abstract

Altmetrics track the attention paid to scholarship via mentions in social media, the press, and other non-traditional venues. For library and information science (LIS) faculty, altmetrics are also a new and important area for research and teaching. We conducted a survey of LIS faculty teaching in US and Canadian graduate LIS programs accredited by the American Library Association in which we asked about their familiarity with and awareness of measures of research impact, including altmetrics. Our results indicate that while most LIS faculty in our sample had some awareness of altmetrics, they reported greater familiarity with traditional measures of research impact such as citation counts and usage statistics. We also confirmed that, among our sample, there was a relationship between years of teaching experience and awareness of altmetrics, as well as among familiarity with altmetrics, familiarity with citation counts, and familiarity with usage statistics. Among the robust, global body of research related to the use of new measures of research impact among scientists and scholars, there are few studies that use survey methods and focus on faculty scholars within a specific discipline. The results of this study contribute new knowledge to the existing body of research on altmetrics and may contribute to the development of LIS graduate curricula devoted to measures of research impact and their application in practice.

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