Eugene to Altmetrics: A chase for virtual foot prints!

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in science communication and promotion of new inventions in this deluge digital information age. The social media tools available on the Internet assist the promotion of science dramatically and the change is happening in real time models. Expansion of World Wide Web and newer technologies has improved the ways in which science is communicated and its evaluation techniques. The use of conventional metric tools gauges the impact of scholarly publications using citation and download counts. They are widely used to evaluate articles, authors and disciplines on publishers’ platforms. These tools analyse the citation data in natural course of time and make them available over a period of time. ‘Altmetrics’ is a concept that addresses and measures the conversations happening in the virtual world in real time. The concept supports the prediction mechanism of possible citations for an article in future, if it gets cited in the social media. This paper attempts to create awareness about ‘Altmetrics’ among Indian scholars and takes a closer look at various features available in ‘Altmetric Explorer’ in order to gain insights of the rapidly changing science communication landscape.