Relevance and Challenges of Altmetrics for Repositories - answers from the *metrics project

• DOI: 10.5072/zenodo.399133
• Publication Date: 2019-10-08
• Authors: Maryam Mehrazar; J. Weiland; Astrid Orth; Julius Stropel; Wolfgang Riese
• Keywords: Altmetrics; Relevance

It is still a challenging task to provide impact indicators other than citations and usage numbers for a repository. Understanding its users is a key element when considering implementing alternative metrics in a repository. Researchers do have specific experiences in working with social media platforms, which might influence the composition of the underlying data (social media mentions) as well as their understanding of the metrics they are confronted with. Within the *metrics project we looked at the technical as well as the user side: with a series of surveys and interviews we studied the attitude of scientists towards social media channels and analysed their motivations and concerns for using the platforms for scientific purposes. In addressing the technical requirements we developed a tool to query a specific set of those social media platforms that users suggested as relevant. Collection of social media mentions needed to cover several identifiers of research output (DOI, handles, ISBN). The integration and adaptation of this tool for EconStor as one of the largest economic repositories is being evaluated by its provider ZBW.