Alt-Index: A proposed Index for measuring the Social Activity of Scientific Research

Altmetrics is a broad term used to refer to article level metrics, which focus on a more timely measurement of interest in scholarly documents made visible through social media (Priem et al., 2010). As with any new metric, concerns have been raised regarding its use (Prime, 2013; Kwok, 2013), due to the fact that an Altmetric score might potentially be manipulated or gamed, just as it is possible to game citations (Bartneck & Kokkelmans, 2011; Wilhite et al., 2012). However, given that there are so many diverse measures now compiled within Altmetrics, the tampering process is actually not that easy (Piwowar, 2013). Altmetric scores have therefore attracted the attention of the scientific community, who, parallel to traditional forms of scholarly communication, are now relying on social media to disseminate research as part of their daily practices (Piwowar, 2013). Thus far, a few studies have shown weak to medium correlations between bibliometric measures and Altmetric scores (Costas et al., 2015). More recently, a comprehensive study using data from Altmetic.com and Scopus has shown that when compared to journal citation scores, Altmetric scores demonstrate a higher-level of accuracy for identifying highly cited publications (Hassan et al., 2017). With this paper, we would like to propose a new measure, termed the alt-index. It is analogous to the h-index (Hirsch 2005), and it is defined as follows: "a scholar has an alt-index of a, if a of her/his Np papers have at least a social mentions, and the other (Np-a) papers have no more than a mentions each".