Posts Tagged ‘altmetrics’

Spring 2022 Graduate Research Assistantship 25-50% – Information Quality Lab – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

November 12th, 2021

Start date – January 16, 2022

Description, Responsibilities, & Qualifications:
Mixed methods research assistant to Information Sciences faculty. The incumbent will join the Information Quality Lab under the direction of Dr. Jodi Schneider to work on a newly-funded, three year IMLS grant, Strengthening Public Libraries’ Information Literacy Service Through an Understanding of Knowledge Brokers’ Assessment of Technical and Scientific Information. This project will conduct mixed methods case studies—COVID-19 year 1; climate change (year 2); and AI and labor (year 3)—to understand how knowledge brokers such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists/advocates, public librarians assess and use scientific and technical information. Ultimately, the project will develop a conceptual model about sensemaking and use of information. Starting in 2023, the team will co-develop services for knowledge brokers and the public, in collaboration with public library test partners. Results from the project will have implications for public access, information literacy, and understanding of science on policy-relevant topics.

Duties may include:

  • Synthesizing a collection of existing literature related to knowledge brokers.
  • Collecting a sample of about 250 public-facing documents and multimedia, including news (e.g., online print outlets), Wikipedia pages, membership-based online forums, documentaries, and data visualizations, that report, quote, or analyze scientific products (research papers, preprints, datasets, etc.).
  • Using topic modeling, argumentation analysis, and other document analysis techniques to analyze documents and multimedia.
  • Preparing for and conducting interviews with knowledge brokers (journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists/advocates, public librarians).
    • Developing an interview protocol to solicit information from journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists/advocates, public librarians, etc. to understand how they assess the quality of scientific and technical information.
    • Identifying COVID-19 knowledge brokers to interview, by using the document/multimedia collection, organizational directories, etc.
  • Qualitative analysis of interview transcripts (including correcting automatically generated interview transcripts).

Required Qualifications:

  • Excellent communication skills in written and spoken English
  • Excellent analytical/critical thinking skills and effective time management skills
  • Interest in topics such as misinformation, information diffusion, science/technology policy, etc.
  • Interest or experience in one or more methods such as: mixed methods, document analysis, altmetrics, semi-structured interviewing, critical incident technique, or qualitative data analysis

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Available for multiple semesters, including summer
  • Experience conducting and/or transcribing interviews
  • Experience with qualitative analysis software such as ATLAS.TI, NVivo, Taguette, RQDA, etc.
  • Experience as a journalist, Wikipedia editor, activist, advocate, public librarian, information conduit, or knowledge broker
  • Enrollment in the Master’s in Library and Information Science program or in a PhD program
  • Previous completion of one or more CITI Program ethics trainings modules
  • Experience in academic and/or scientific writing

Application Procedure: Interested candidates should send a cover letter and resume in a single pdf file named Lastname_IMLS_RA.pdf (e.g., Schneider_IMLS_RA.pdf) to ischool-infoquality@illinois.edu

Review of applications will begin immediately. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. All applications received by November 15, 2021 will receive full consideration.

Posted on the Assistantship Clearinghouse.

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Graduate Hourly position – Information Quality Lab – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

November 12th, 2021

Start date – ASAP

Description, Responsibilities, & Qualifications:
Mixed methods research assistant to Information Sciences faculty. The incumbent will join the Information Quality Lab under the direction of Dr. Jodi Schneider to work on a newly-funded, three year IMLS grant, Strengthening Public Libraries’ Information Literacy Service Through an Understanding of Knowledge Brokers’ Assessment of Technical and Scientific Information. This project will conduct mixed methods case studies (first topic: COVID-19) to understand how knowledge brokers such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists/advocates, public librarians assess and use scientific and technical information. Ultimately, the project will develop a conceptual model about sensemaking and use of information. Starting in 2023, the team will co-develop services for knowledge brokers and the public, in collaboration with public library test partners. Results from the project will have implications for public access, information literacy, and understanding of science on policy-relevant topics.

This position may become a tuition waiver generating assistantship for the Spring 2022 semester for eligible Master’s and Doctoral students.

Initial duties will include:

  • Developing an interview protocol to solicit information from journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists/advocates, public librarians, etc. to understand how they assess the quality of scientific and technical information
  • Synthesizing a collection of existing literature related to knowledge brokers
  • Collecting a sample of about 250 public-facing documents and multimedia, including news (e.g., online print outlets), Wikipedia pages, membership-based online forums, documentaries, and data visualizations, that report, quote, or analyze scientific products (research papers, preprints, datasets, etc.)
  • Identifying COVID-19 knowledge brokers to interview, by using the document/multimedia collection, organizational directories, etc.

Future work will include:

  • Conducting interviews with knowledge brokers (journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists/advocates, public librarians)
  • Correcting automatically generated interview transcripts
  • Qualitative analysis of interview transcripts
  • Using topic modeling, argumentation analysis, and other document analysis techniques to analyze documents and multimedia
  • Case studies on climate change (year 2) and AI and labor (year 3)

Required Qualifications:

  • Excellent communication skills in written and spoken English
  • Excellent analytical/critical thinking skills and effective time management skills
  • Interest in topics such as: misinformation, information diffusion, science/technology policy
  • Interest or experience in one or more methods such as: mixed methods, document analysis, altmetrics, semi-structured interviewing, critical incident technique, or qualitative data analysis

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Available for multiple semesters, including summer
  • Experience conducting and/or transcribing interviews
  • Experience with qualitative analysis software such as ATLAS.TI, NVivo, Taguette, RQDA, etc.
  • Experience as a journalist, Wikipedia editor, activist, advocate, public librarian, information conduit, or knowledge broker
  • Enrollment in the Master’s in Library and Information Science program or in a PhD program
  • Previous completion of one or more CITI Program ethics trainings modules
  • Experience in academic and/or scientific writing

Compensation: minimum $18/hour for Master’s students or $20/hour for PhD students (negotiable commensurate with experience)

Application Procedure: Interested candidates should send a cover letter and resume in a single PDF file named Lastname_IMLS_hourly.pdf (e.g., Schneider_IMLS_hourly.pdf) to ischool-infoquality@illinois.edu.

Review of applications will begin immediately. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. All applications received by November 15, 2021 will receive full consideration.

Posted on the University of Illinois Financial Aid Virtual Job Board and Handshake.

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Altmetrics can help surface quality content: Jason Priem on the Decoupled Journal as the achievable future of scholarly communication

November 4th, 2012

Jason Priem has a wonderful slidedeck on how to smoothly transition from today’s practices in scientific communication to the future. Here is my reading of the argument given in Jason’s slides:

Communicating science is a central and essential part of doing science, and we have always used the best technology available.
Yet currently, there are several problems with journals, the primary form of scholarly communication.

Journal publication is

  • Slow
  • Closed
  • Hard to innovate
  • and has

  • Restrictive format: function follows form
  • Inconsistent quality control

These problems are fixable, if we realize that journals serve four traditional functions:

  1. Registration
  2. Archiving
  3. Dissemination
  4. Certification

By decoupling these functions, into an a la carte publishing menu, we can fix the scholarly communication system. Decoupled scholarly outlets already exist. Jason mentions some outlets (I would say these mainly serve registration functions, maybe also dissemination ones):

  • ArXiv
  • Math Overflow
  • SSRN
  • Faculty of 1000 Research
  • the blag-o-sphere

Jason doesn’t mention here — but we could add to this list — systems for data publishing, e-science workflow, and open notebook science; these may fulfil registration and archiving functions. Also, among existing archiving systems, we could add the journal archiving functions of LOCKSS is the main player I’m familiar with.

To help with the certification functions, we have altmetrics tools like Impact Story (Jason’s Sloan Founded project with Heather Piwowar).

Jason’s argument well worth reading in full; it’s a well-articulated argument for decoupling journal functions, with some detailed descriptions of altmetrics. The core argument is very solid, and of wide interest: Unlike previous articulations for “pre-publication peer review”, this argument will make sense to everyone who believes in big data, I think. There are other formats: video of the talk ((Thanks to Siegfriend Handschuh, who suggested the video of Jason giving this talk at Purdue.)) and a draft article called “Decoupling the scholarly journal” ((by Jason Priem and Bradley M. Hemminger, under review for the Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience special issue “Beyond open access: visions for open evaluation of scientific papers by post-publication peer review”)).


Briefly noted in some of my earlier tweets.

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Commercial Altmetric Explorer aimed at publishers

May 7th, 2012

Altmetrics is hitting its stride: 30 months after the Altmetrics manifesto ((J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Altmetrics: A manifesto, (v.1.0), 26 October 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto)), there are 6 tools listed. This is great news!

I tried out the beta of a new commercial tool, The Altmetric Explorer, from Altmetric.com. They are building on the success and ideas of the academic and non-profit community (but not formally associated with Altmetrics.org). The Altmetric Explorer gives overviews of articles and journals by the social media mentions. You can filter by publisher, journal, subject, source, etc. Altmetric Explore has a closed beta, but you can try the basic functionality on articles with their open tool, the PLoS Impact explorer.

"The default view shows the articles mentioned most frequently in all sources, from all journals. Various filters are available.


Rolling over the donut shows which sources (Twitter, blogs, ...) an article was mentioned in.


Sparklines can be used to compare journals.


A 'people' tab lets you look at individual messages. Rolling over the photo or avatar shows the poster's profile.

Altmetric.com seems largely aimed at publishers ((“Altmetric sustains itself by selling more detailed data and analysis tools to publishers, institutions and academic societies.”, says the bookmarklet page, to explain why that is free)). This may add promotional noise, not unlike coercive citation, if it is used as an evaluation metric as they suggest: ((‘This quote from an editor as a condition for publication highlights the problem: “you cite Leukemia [once in 42 references]. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Leukemia to your present article”’-from the abstract of Science. 2012 Feb 3;335(6068):542-3. Scientific publications. Coercive citation in academic publishing. Wilhite AW, Fong EA. summary on Science Daily.))

Want to see which journals have improved their profile in social media or with a particular news outlet?

Their API is currently free for non-commercial use. Altmetric.com are crawling Twitter since July 2011 and focusing on papers with PubMed, arXiv, and DOI identifiers. They also get data from Facebook, Google+, and blogs, but they don’t disclose how. (I assume that blogs using ResearchBlogging code are crawled, for instance.)

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