How to make altmetrics useful in societal impact assessments: shifting from citation to interaction approaches

The suitability of altmetrics for use in assessments of societal impact has been questioned by certain recent studies. Ismael Ràfols, Nicolas Robinson-García and Thed N. van Leeuwen propose that, rather than mimicking citation-based approaches to scientific impact evaluation, assessments of societal impact should be aimed at learning rather than auditing, and focused on understanding the engagement approaches that lead to impact. When using altmetric data for societal impact assessment, greater value might be derived from adopting “interaction approaches” to analyse engagement networks among researchers and stakeholders. Experimental analyses using data from Twitter are presented here to illustrate such an approach.