Name of the Year
Cleveland Evans reports the results of the voting on the Name of the Year, which took place at the annual meeting of the American Name Society in Minneapolis on January 3 2014 in this issue. This event always provides a source of interesting discussion and commentary.
Altmetrics
The neologism “altmetrics” is defined in Wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altmetrics> [accessed 6 January 2014]) as follows:
Altmetrics are new metrics proposed as an alternative to the widely used journal impact factor and personal citation indices like the h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the twitter #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc. Altmetrics cover not just citation counts, but also other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, downloads, or mentions in social media and news media....
Altmetrics are a very broad group of metrics, capturing various parts of impact a paper or work can have. A classification of altmetrics was proposed by ImpactStory in September 2012, and a very similar classification is used by the Public Library of Science as follows:
| • | Viewed — HTML views and PDF downloads | ||||
| • | Discussed — journal comments, science blogs, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and other social media | ||||
| • | •Saved — Mendeley, CiteULike and other social bookmarks | ||||
| • | Cited — citations in the scholarly literature, tracked by Web of Science, Scopus, CrossRef and others | ||||
| • | Recommended — for example used by F1000Prime | ||||
The Wikipedia entry goes on to discuss the flaws of this type of metric. Reliance on altmetrics is controversial because such citations may be manipulated to show an increased citation rate. The reader should consult the Wikipedia site as well as David Crotty’s (Senior Editor with Oxford University Press’s journal publishing program) essay entitled “Driving Almetrics Performance through Marketing — A New Differentiator for Scholarly Journals?” (<http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/10/07/ altmetrics-and-the-value-of-publicity-efforts-for-journal-publishers> [accessed 6 January 2014]) in which the author discusses the possible influence of altmetrics in academia, especially in terms of “gaming the system,” e.g., measurements of interest and attention. The author cites Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric (<http://www. altmetric.com>), who has written an insightful essay entitled “Gaming almetrics” (<http://www.altmetric.com/blog/gaming-altmetrics> [accessed 7 January 2014]). It should be noted that altmetrics might add another, possibly dubious, dimension in college and university personnel decisions. To be sure, as Crotty notes, journal publishers already engage in significant amount of promotion of the articles in their academic venues, e.g., press conferences, press releases, interviews with media outlets, blog posts, tweets, social media campaigns, Google, adword campaigns, email marketing campaigns, advertising, awards, and so forth. The full impact of altmetrics remains to be seen.
Requirements for Submissions to NAMES
Several recent submissions to the journal indicate that authors have not paid attention to the following requirement for submissions to NAMES. We ask that all authors read and comply with this prerequisite for submissions to the journal. Following these rules will facilitate the processing of submissions, and it will expedite editorial responses. This policy was decided at the meeting of the Executive Council of the American Name Society January 2011 and published in the Editorial in NAMES 59:2 (2011), 65.
NAMES is dedicated to publishing a broad diversity of previously unpublished scholarly articles and book reviews in the field of onomastics. Authors from every corner of the world are therefore warmly encouraged to submit their work. Please be aware, however, that NAMES requires all submissions to adhere to US American English grammar, punctuation, spelling, and style. All manuscripts must be scrupulously edited before submission to ensure the highest standard of academic writing. Work with numerous factual, typographical, and/or grammatical errors will not be accepted for peer review. Before submission, it is therefore strongly recommended that all manuscripts be carefully edited for style, content, and grammar by an experienced proofreader who is a native-speaker of US American English. Any contractual arrangement, which the author(s) may enter into will, however, be exclusively the sole financial responsibility of the author(s). Please be aware that the use of professional proofreading services will in no way guarantee the acceptance of a submission by the review committee and Journal editorial staff. However, the failure to appropriately edit a submission will automatically be considered sufficient grounds for immediate, unqualified rejection.
It should be noted that Maney Publishing has an arrangement with the Charlesworth Group, which offers a 10 percent discount for Maney authors.
The link is: <http://www.maneyonline.com/page/authors/languageediting>
Notes
The article entitled “‘Kankakee’: An Old Etymological Puzzle” originally appeared in Names 52:4 (2004), 287–304. Because of typesetting issues that occurred in the initial version, it now appears in its appropriate format in the current issue of Names.