1) JMIR has been collecting and measuring social media resonance on Twitter for over 3 years now – we call this the Twimpact Factor (see “Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact” http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/). The TWIF and related metrics (TWINDEX) are displayed here: http://www.jmir.org/stats/mostTweeted

2) altmetrics is really just a fancy term for infometrics, webometrics, social media metrics, infodemiology metrics etc. If you google these terms, you will note that these ideas are not as new as you might think

3) WebCite (http://www.webcitation.org) was also originally set up not only to archive cited work on webpages, but also to collect metrics for impact based on citations/mentionings of webpages (open access articles?). It also creates a “publishing a-la-carte” system (Priem), where researchers can first publish something on the Internet, archive it (or have it archived by throw parties who want to cite it – i.e. create a WebCite snapshot), assign a DOI, have it peer-reviewed, and then view alternative metrics. Perhaps now is the time to fund disruptive systems like this which turn the traditional publishing system on its head?

I would like to see a new system in which the crude measures underlying publish-or-perish are binned (as a random system couldnt be worse) and people just publish everything they think worthwhile directly to the web and then things get a reputation directly from how people react to them. At the moment the key problems appear to be (1) peer review which in medicine at least is well-known to just bias in favour of establishment drivel or mutual backscratching cliques, and (2) pubmed inclusion (and google status) which again bias against anything new and deter people from just putting on web (because of need to be prominently indexed) – and researchers be negatively-treated for their drivel publications such that there is a much lower volume of output and a concentration on only publishing genuinely worthwhile material. Of course all this may be different outside the medical field.

The author seems to be entirely lacking the concept that popularity/fashionableness/newsworthiness has only marginal or even non-relationship with real quality. Indeed can well be inversely related. For instance Wegener’s continental drift ignored by professionals for 50 years, Mendel’s genetics experiments ignored for decades, Dr Down’s descriptions of what are now called late and early autism, not even registered by the majority of autism researchers even now, the list goes on. The greatest discoveries have been notoriously COMPLETELY IGNORED (Impact Factor zero, H factor zero) by the “peer” community rather than salivated over with whopping citation impacts.

The same nonsense with so-called peer review which has been repeatedly shown to be nothing to do with quality but only with conventional wisdom fashionableness and hence again strongly negative against the real breakthrough discoveries.

There is no substitute for actually reading and evaluating the thing itself with reference to the actual evidence. The real sci lit problem is the publish-perish system which is drowning the genuine science under huge oceans of drivel. For this reason a high proportion of professional science contributes negatively rather than positively, not that any sorts of impact factors could ever tell you so..