How many tweets is a lot?

Total-impact is getting pretty good at finding raw numbers of tweets, bookmarks, and other interactions. But these numbers are hard to interpret. Say I’ve got 5 tweets on a paper—am I doing well? To answer that, we must know how much activity we expect on a paper like this one.

But how do we know what to expect? To figure this out, we’ll need to account for a number of factors:

First, expected impact depends on the age of the paper.  Older papers have had longer to accumulate impact: an older paper is likely to have more citations than a younger paper.

Second, especially for some metrics, expected impact depends on the absolute year of publication.  Because papers often get a spike in social media attention at the time of publication, papers published in years when a social tool is very popular recieve more attention on that tool than papers published before or after the tool was popular.  For example, papers published in years when twitter has been popular recieve more tweets than papers published in the 1980s.

Third, expected impact depends on the size of the field.  The more people there are who read papers like this, the more people there are who might Like it.

Fourth, expected impact depends on the tool adoption patterns of the subdiscipline.  Papers in fields with a strong Mendeley community will have more Mendeley readers than papers published in fields that tend to use Zotero.

Finally, expected impact levels depends on what we mean by papers “like this.”  How do we define the relevant reference set?  Other papers in this journal?  Papers with the same indexing terms?  Funded under the same program?  By investigators I consider my competition?

There are other variables too.  For example, a paper published in a journal that tweets all its new publications will get a twitter boost, an Open Access paper might receive more Shares than a paper behind a paywall, and so on.

Establishing a clear and robust baseline won’t be easy, given all of this compexity!  That said, let’s start.  Stay tuned for our plans…

(part 1 of a series on how total-impact plans to give context to the altmetrics it reports. see part 2, part 3, and part 4.)