Altmetrics: Measuring Engagement with Contemporary Leisure Scholarship

Abstract

Tweet: #Altmetrics can shape how #leisure scholars think about sharing #research for greater public impact @LeisureSciences. Altmetrics, or “alternative metrics” measure scholarly and public engagement with scholarship through traditional metrics (e.g., citation counts) and contemporary metrics (e.g., mentions on social media and news outlets in real time). Since their emergence in 2010, they now play a role in the tenure process and factor into how scholars write articles and engage with social media to increase public consumption of their research (bridging the public/ivory tower/practitioner divide). In this research note, we describe altmetrics and answer some questions surrounding them. Questions we explore include: What are altmetrics? How are they calculated? What are the benefits of measuring scholarship in this way? What tensions exist in measuring scholarship in this way? How can leisure scholars engage with altmetrics? And why should leisure scholars/studies care about altmetrics?

Keywords:

• analytics
• alternative metrics
• public scholar
• social media
• Twitter

Notes

1 While tweets may “reach” millions of users, it is important to note that this does not necessarily mean the reader has engaged with the tweet/post in any meaningful way. They may have “read” it as they scrolled; thus, thinking through metrics that measure “views” vs. “interactions” (liking) vs. “engagement” (comment, re-post) is important.