Are Altmetrics Useful for Assessing Scientific Impact? A Survey

The rapidly expanding corpus of scientific publications poses various types of challenges for researchers, mostly concerning the selection and assessment of publications relevant to their research topic. Therefore, the scientific community is actively involved in proposing solutions for effectively retrieving promising publications. Traditional bibliometrics, such as citations, are most commonly used for evaluating the research impact of a publication, in spite of rightful criticism. More recently, the newly introduced altmetrics (e.g., Tweets) have gained popularity and are constantly being investigated to understand their usefulness and potential benefits for assessing the significance of publications. Researchers argue that altmetrics can be used to reflect the importance of a publication beyond the boundaries of traditional bibliometrics. However, it is important to be aware of the limitations and threats arising from altmetrics, too. In this paper, we present a survey analysis to understand the usefulness of altmetrics and determine their ability of being used as quality indicators for scientific research. Based on the findings, we discuss whether altmetrics can support the quality assessment during literature analyses to assist the analyst by reducing the required time and manual effort.