Tying in with the digital scholarship panel coming up in January – Altmetrics, a possible replacement for a journal’s impact factor.
Scholars are producing content that gets published in repositories and archives, blogs, and social media — separately from or in addition to journals. Some researchers are publishing and contributing their data to repositories such as ChemBank and GenBank. Others, such as in the creative arts, are capturing performances or music in digital video and audio files that can be shared just like journal articles. Traditional citation measures are not well-suited to assessing the impact of these non-traditional content forms. If we want to have a full view of a scholar’s impact, we need to find a way to measure the usage and impact of these newer forms of content distribution.