Social Media Metrics – Topsy

David — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:57:05 +0000

I regular write for Research Information, an online and print publication about online content and information management. Whilst online publishing can give you access to a host of statistics not readily available in the traditional printed copy, publishing on someone else’s site means that you have to look for some of the traces left on the web. Whereas in the past I would have first looked for inlinks to web pages, now I tend to focus more on the conversations happening on social media sites such as Twitter.

Today I was pleased to see how the two Research Information articles that have been published up to now [there are more in the pipeline] compare with other articles in the same journal.

According to Topsy 81 of Research Information’s web pages have been mentioned on Twitter, and the most popular two are by me: Programming skills could transform librarians’ roles (78 mentions); Web 2.0 fails to excite today’s researchers (67 mentions).

As would be expected, at least by the biblio-/webo- metricians amongst you, the distribution of Twitter mentions broadly follows a power law.

Which means third place is quite a distance behind on 43 mentions, and the vast majority of pages have only been mentioned once or twice.

Metrics are only the start of a conversation rather than the end, as there are a host of possible reasons for the difference in Twitter mentions, e.g., my papers may be considered more controversial by some sections. Nonetheless, it’s nice to start the conversation from the top of the pile .

Social Media Metrics and Scholarly Publishing 2.0: A couple more articles

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:12:07 +0000

I have been lucky enough to be snowed under with work over the last couple of weeks, with a lot of my time being spent working on a couple of articles I have been asked to write: one on social media metrics; and one on scholarly publishing 2.0. As I’ve mentioned before, I love writing articles because it’s a great way to supplement one’s income and advertise one’s abilities. It also forces you to construct your thoughts in a coherent manner. Whereas a blog post is generally off-the-cuff, and presentations can rely too heavily on mere rhetoric, knowledge of an editor’s critical eye forces journal articles to be built on stronger arguments.

The two pieces provided me with two different problems. The problem with writing a piece on social media metrics is that you obviously don’t have carte blanche to ramble on for as many pages as you like, whereas when writing about scholarly publishing 2.0 it is all too easy to start slipping into ‘ranting blogger’ mode, rather than ‘objective professional’ mode.

Social Media Metrics are increasingly recognised as important, and will be the focus of an increasing number of books over the years to come. However with so many different technologies, being used for so many different purposes, it is quite hard to provide an informative article in just 2,500 words. It’s about finding a compromise between a piece that focuses too much on abstract concepts such as ‘influence’ and one that just provides concrete descriptions of some of the specific metrics that are possible.

When writing about Open Science and Scholarly Publishing 2.0 I find near impossible to not get excited about the opportunities that the new generation of web technologies offer to the advancement of science, but also despair at the lack of progress in terms of academics embracing these technologies. Something I have been equally culpable of as an academic. The positive feedback from the editor would seem to indicate that I managed to steer just far away enough from ranting blogger to make it into print.

David Stuart » social media metrics

Social Media Metrics – Topsy

Social Media Metrics and Scholarly Publishing 2.0: A couple more articles