542973
research-article2014
AESXXX10.1177/1090820X14542973Aesthetic Surgery JournalCress
Editorial
Using Altmetrics and Social Media to
Supplement Impact Factor: Maximizing Your
Article’s Academic and Societal Impact
Aesthetic Surgery Journal
2014, Vol. 34(7) 1123­–1126
© 2014 The American Society for
Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Inc.
Reprints and permission:
http://www​.sagepub.com/
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DOI: 10.1177/1090820X14542973
www.aestheticsurgeryjournal.com
Phaedra E. Cress, BA
Study the past if you would define the future.
—Confucius
In 1955, Dr Eugene Garfield published a revolutionary article in Science that forever altered how we measure the
impact of scientific articles. In his article, “Citation Indexes
for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation Through
Association of Ideas,”1 he proposed what would become
the Science Citation Index, offering academic journals an
Impact Factor (IF) to gauge the importance of their published research.
As I sit here on my MacBook Air in 2014 hearing the
ping of new emails and the ding of incoming texts while
reading Garfield’s article, which describes early tools like
Shepard’s Citations developed in 1873,1 I’m struck by how
far we’ve come in 60 years. I think it’s fair to say that prior
to drafting a new manuscript, most authors will scour the
literature, research via PubMed and PubMed Central, and
Google search for redundancy to their own proposed work,
asking questions such as: Has someone already tackled
this problem? Who was it? When was it? How is my work
(potentially) better or more novel? What can I add to the
academic literature to justify the publication of this work?
The days of singularly consulting print volumes are behind
us—the “digital generation” has thrust itself upon us all.
The importance of the IF as a measurement tool cannot
be overstated, and we believe in its validity as a gauge to
monitor the performance and success of the Aesthetic Surgery
Journal (ASJ). We will continue our efforts to focus on highimpact articles that will improve the IF score. However, for
the past several years, the literature has seen the addition of
articles refuting its omnipresence and bemoaning its emphasis on Review articles over new research. The debate over
the science and relevance of the IF in varying disciplines is
likely one that will continue ad nauseum. The loudest voices
in the argument may be those whose scores remain modest
year over year, or whose content is generally not cited until
more than 2 years postpublication, such as in mathematics,
leaving them with a slower response or validation of their
publication.2
It’s unlikely that Thomson Reuters, which calculates
and distributes IF scores each June (but delayed them until
July 29 this year so they could launch InCites to offer more
metrics and analysis for authors), will modify the Journal
Citation Reporting (JCR) to its 225 subjects in Science and
Social Science to respond to the disciplines that question
its utility. Some authors or editors may choose to place less
emphasis on it while others may endeavor to manipulate
the system and artificially inflate their own journal’s
scores. But the odds are guaranteed that by publishing in a
journal with an IF, your work will become a part of the
bibliometric data set that fluctuates each year and yields
new scores for academic journals.
The technological landscape has advanced light years
since the advent of the Science Citation Index and IF score
reporting. So why is it still the gold standard? Probably
because academic institutions base promotions partly on
an individual’s publications, linking the weight and gravitas of the papers to the IF of the journal in which they
appear.
One might argue: we continue using it in the absence of
something better. I would argue there is something new in
the landscape that offers journals and authors the ability to
ascertain the societal impact of an article and, by extension, a journal much more rapidly than relying solely on
the IF score. A supplement, if you will.
Altmetrics (which stems from “article-level metrics”)
may be considered a modern-day complement to the IF
score. By calculating every tweet, like, knowledge base hit,
Phaedra E. Cress is the Executive Editor of Aesthetic Surgery Journal,
Garden Grove, California.
Corresponding Author:
Phaedra E. Cress, BA, ASAPS, 11262 Monarch St, Garden Grove, CA
92841-1441, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]
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Aesthetic Surgery Journal 34(7)
Figure 1. According to Altmetrics, this article ranked first in 2013 with a score of 7405. It was published in Scientific Reports
Open Access. It’s important to consider that the open-access medium may have contributed to the higher score. http://www.
altmetric.com/top100. Accessed May 21, 2014.
blog, and mass media mention, Altmetrics LLC (London,
UK) and other competitors can calculate a score or “badge”
for every published article. It recently posted its top 100
ranking for articles published in 2013. The top one scored
7405, as illustrated in Figure 1. You can see the overwhelming majority of social interest hails from Twitter followed
by Facebook. Altmetrics was formed in 2011, so the technology is relatively new and nimble, because it must be to
offer a competitive solution or supplement in this space.
Tracking the life of an individual article allows us to discern how it is read and used, which may validate journal
publication strategies. Think of it as a quick pulse for
(potentially) nonexperts in the field reading an article; they
can assess relevance to their own work today versus waiting months or years as citations collect. Figure 2 shows
that the second-ranked article garnered a much lower
score, but the base of social media contributions was much
more diverse. The buzz about Altmetrics has caught on as
a supplement to the traditional IF score methodology—and
new competitors such as ImpactStory (Carrboro, New
Jersey) have joined the party, receiving sizable grants from
the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation. It’s important to note that Altmetrics is being
applied to articles published in journals with an IF, where
the influence of IF is linked to the journal’s importance in
the discipline. To test altmetrics on your own article, you
can download the bookmarklet here and then “altmetric it”
with one click: http://www.altmetric.com/bookmarklet
.php.
We ran the Altmetrics algorithm on a recently published
ASJ article by Stevens et al3 that scored a 15; it received 1
news outlet pickup, 6 tweets, 3 likes on Facebook, and 2
readers on Mendeley (Figure 3). Another ASJ article by
Swanson4 received a score of 24 based solely on 3 news
outlet contributions. Our n=2 test parried the top
Altmetrics articles in the sense that some garnered diverse
social media contributions and others did not. It will be
interesting to observe the trends in this area as more journals and authors take advantage of this alternative scoring
system.
You may be wondering: how can we be sure Altmetrics
really works, and what is the relationship (if any) to IF
citations? The same question has been asked in publishing
about the relationship between article downloads (commonly called usage statistics) and citations—with many
erroneously assuming high usage begets high citations.
According to Thelwall et al,5 “Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and
higher citations for articles with positive Altmetric scores
in all cases with sufficient evidence (tweets, Facebook wall
posts, research highlights, blog mentions, mainstream
media mentions and forum posts) except perhaps for
Google+ posts.” Thelwall et al compared 11 altmetric
sources ranging from 76 to 208 739 “hits” with Web of
Science citations to 208 739 PubMed articles that garnered
at least 1 altmetric mention. They use a lowercase a to
describe altmetrics as an umbrella term for any and all
alternative metrics such as Twitter, Facebook, blog posts,
Cress1125
Figure 2. The second-ranked article in 2013 was published in New England Journal of Medicine and focused on cardiovascular
disease prevention. The contributions to the score of 2260 are more varied than in Figure 1, but Twitter is still the greatest
contributing factor, followed next by Facebook. http://www.altmetric.com/top100. Accessed May 21, 2014.
Figure 3. The Altmetric score of a recently published ASJ
article. The score reflects a nice variety of social media
components; news outlet coverage carries the strongest “weight”
in the algorithm that comprises the score. Score calculated using
an Altmetric bookmarklet available at: www.altmetric.com.
and so on, whereas I have been capitalizing Altmetrics to
reflect both the company name and the calculated score
itself. Thelwall et al caution us to consider the effect of
time when comparing the relationship between traditional
citations and altmetrics because articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or
reverse this association.5
At the ASJ, we engage all facets of social media to
expand the reach of the content we publish for the benefit
of the authors, the Journal, and the specialty as a whole.
We encourage our authors to sign up for professional
Twitter and Facebook accounts and to connect with their
colleagues through LinkedIn, a professional networking
site. Through these avenues, aesthetic surgeons can leverage social media opportunities to their own professional
and academic advantage. If ASJ, its authors, and its readers partner together, we can share ideas and research
among our respective networks to elevate the community
and spotlight aesthetic surgery both nationally and internationally. Since social media and its derivatives move
faster than a teenager texting, articles are afforded an early
assessment of impact. Finally, it helps authors connect
with the academic community over shared interest in a
field of expertise, improve discoverability, and, it is suspected, increase article citations.
We study history to avoid repeating mistakes but also to
guide us in our quest to innovate and push the envelope.
Of the IF tool, Garfield1 said, “The new bibliographic tool,
like others that already exist, is just a starting point in literature research. It will help in many ways, but one should
not expect it to solve all our problems.” There may never
be a one-stop shopping resource that answers every
1126
question posed in the medical and scientific spheres, but
we can leverage altmetrics and social media and embrace
the IF’s strong historical performance to ensure that optimal academic and societal impact is afforded to scholarly
work now and for future generations of aesthetic plastic
surgeons.
Disclosures
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and publication of this
article.
References
1.Garfield E. Citation Indexes for Science: a new dimension
in documentation through association of ideas. Science.
1955;122(7):108-111.
Aesthetic Surgery Journal 34(7)
2.Arnold DN, Fowler KK. Nefarious numbers. Notices AMS.
2011;58(3):434-437.
3.Stevens WG, Pietrzak LK, Spring MA. Broad overview of
a clinical and commercial experience with CoolSculpting.
Aesthetic Surg J. 2013;33(7):1065-1068.
4.Swanson E. The commercialization of plastic surgery.
Aesthetic Surg J. 2013;33(6):835-846.
5.Thelwall M, Haustein S, Larivière V, Sugimoto CR. Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services.
PLoS ONE. 2013;8(5):e64841.