CfP: PlosOne, "altmetrics: Tracking scholarly impact on the social Web"

Call for papers: PLoSOneon "altmetrics: Tracking scholarly impact on the social Web"

 Deadline: January 28^th, 2012

Details at: http://altmetrics.org/plosone/ 

The huge increase in scientific output is presenting scholars with a deluge of data. There is growing concern that scholarly output may be swamping traditional mechanisms for both pre-publication filtering (e.g. peer review) and post-publication impact filtering (e.g. the Journal Impact Factor).
Increasing scholarly use of Web 2.0 tools like CiteULike, Mendeley, Twitter, and blogs presents an opportunity to create new filters. Metrics based on a diverse set of social sources could yield broader, richer, and timelier assessments of current and potential scholarly impact. Realizing this, many authors have begun to call for investigation of these metrics under the banner of “altmetrics.” Specifically, altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship.

Despite the growing speculation and early exploratory investigation into the value of altmetrics, there remains little concrete, objective research into the properties of these metrics: their validity, their potential value and flaws, and their relationship to established measures. Nor has there been any large umbrella to bring these multiple approaches together.

Following on from a first successful workshop on altmetrics, this collection aims to provide a forum for the dissemination of innovative research on these metrics.

We seek high quality submissions that advance the understanding of the efficacy of altmetrics, addressing research areas including:

• Validated new metrics based on social media.

• Tracking science communication on the Web.

• Relation between traditional metrics and altmetrics including validation and correlation.

• The relationship between peer review and altmetrics.

• Evaluated tools for gathering, analyzing, or disseminating altmetrics.