Here comes post 4 in the #futurescience20 brainstorming series. It’s about the future of the impact factor.
Today, impact of research is fundamentally measured by citation in prestigious journals. There are a number of problems about it: mainly that this implies strong delays (up to 5 years) , that “Citations are only a small fraction of how a paper is reused”, and that articles are only one of the kind of scientific outputs [Buschman, M., & Michalek, A. (2010). Are Alternative Metrics Still Alternative ?].
In 2030, impact factor will be multidimensional, granular and real time.
It will consider not just the article citation, but other measures such as actual downloads, views, book holding; number of likes, favourites, “read-later” buttons; mentions on social media and wikipedia. These measures are already starting to become available through services such as altmetric.com and http://www.plumanalytics.com/metrics.html . It will go even further. It will measures to what extent people are reading and highlighting sections of the articles through electronic readers – as already made visible by kindle.amazon.com.
This will enable everyone to map not only article metrics, but actual sub-sections of the article as well as of the dataset (granularity).
And all this will be made available in real time. Scientists will be informed in real time about discussion happening on the web about their work. They will be able to connect to other scientists that “think alike” and discover serendipitous connections. The impact factor metrics will become not only a management and reputation tool, but an actual service to scientists.
Policy and technology: a "longue durée" view 
December 29, 2013 at 6:17 pm
Nice post, I agree!
Although I wonder if it’ll take as long as 2030. We’re already hearing from some of our users at ImpactStory that they’re using the altmetrics data we find for them in tenure and promotion materials–and that reviewers are reporting they’re impressed.
Of course, for now that just a few early adopters…but I suspect we’re closer than many imagine to a tipping point for altmetrics in evaluation.
December 30, 2013 at 10:40 am
Thanks Jason. Congrats for ImpactStory.
Obviously, I am not making predictions but trying to spell out the shape of this possible change.
In your experience, which altmetrics are more considered? surely dataset citation can’t be the same as number of retweets, right?
My perception is that social media impact should be less important than other, more scientific related measurements such as dataset citation. Is this correct?
December 30, 2013 at 7:39 pm
I’m not sure I’d say any one type of impact is more or less important than another; rather, different types of impact may be more or less important depending on context.
One of the most surprising responses to ImpactStory data that we’ve heard has been reviewers’ interest in view data for slide presentations, which we pull from Slideshare. But as you say, certainly things like dataset citation are getting a lot of interest as well.