Using Altmetrics to Explore the Scholarly Conversation with Undergraduates

An emerging tool called altmetrics allows students to more fully engage with and evaluate the conversations surrounding scholarship. Altmetrics represents the online attention to research from sources such as news media outlets, social media, public policy documents, reference managers, blogs, Wikipedia, patents, syllabi, and more. Altmetrics has previously been used by researchers, industry, and research institutions to track the public engagement of scholarship, but this pioneering approach combines undergraduate library instruction with the scholarly conversation to demonstrate the expanding scope of altmetrics in the classroom. The speakers will show how altmetrics can be used to discover broader conversations around research, evaluate scholarly information, and analyze the short-term and long-term influence of scholarly works both in academic and public spheres.