More on Metrics for the Arts and Humanities

At their best, altmetrics tools are meant to encourage scholarly activity around published papers on line. It can seem, indeed, like a chicken-and-egg situation: without healthy, collegial, reciprocal cultures of scholarly interaction on the web, mentions of scholarly content will not be significant. Simultaneously, if publications do not provide identifiers like DOIs and authors, publishers and/or institutitons do not perceive any value in sharing their content, altmetrics will yet again be less significant. Altmetrics can work as search and discovery tools for both scholarly communities around academic outputs on the web, but they cannot and should not be thought as unquestionable proxies of either “impact” or “quality”. The value of these metrics lies in providing us with indicators of activity– any value obtained from them can only be the result of asking the right questions, providing context and doing the leg work– assessing outputs on their own right and their own context.