Page 209 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

208 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 8, 2016

technical workers’ inevitable pursuit of the quantity of articles and their excessive attention to
the ranks of journals,the shift of the focus of the library and information workers as well as the
corresponding information management agencies from the process of scientific communication
and scientific information itself to the mere carriers of scientific information,and the hindrance to
the effective dissemination of scientific information due to the larger scientific and technological
publishers’ monopoly on most high-quality resources,etc. The development of digital network
context has provided wide groundings for informal communication,and the powerful return of
informal communication through e-mail,online academic community,personal archive,and
electronic pre-print archive,is gradually improving human information communication
environment,which offers not only new digital recording tools to trace scientific workers’
behaviors in terms of knowledge creation,communication,and utilization,but also new
opportunities for the innovation of the scientific and technological evaluation methods and
concepts. Scientific communication system consists of two parts,formal and informal ones. The
metric techniques based on citation distribution have provided a rigorous academic influence
evaluation index system for formal communication. Then it becomes an important topic for
scientometrics in the digitalized network context to explore metric characteristics of informal
communication and to construct evaluation index systems for its social influence.
The advent of Altmetrics provides a new paradigm and tool to evaluate,to a certain extent,the
social influence of scientific and technological achievements. Many practices have provided
fundamental initial researches for the development of Altmetrics,such as Altmetrics innovation
project by National Information Standards Organization,Altmetrics indicators efficiency research
by Higher Education Funding Council for England to explore the influence factors in Research
Excellent Framework,Altmetrics value analysis by Wellcome Trust Fund to explore organizational
learning and fund strategies through ALMs /Altmetrics,and so on. All those researches demonstrate
that Altmetrics is a complement to rather than a substitute for traditional citation-based scientific
and technological evaluation. Therefore,the combination of the two for comprehensive evaluation
is a must.
In this paper,some strategies and methods are presented to combine Altmetrics and the
traditional metrics from the perspectives of theory expansion,tools development and international
cooperation,etc. In essence,in the context of comprehensive scientific and technological
evaluation,on the one hand,we need to strengthen the theory research based on the scientific
communication system and improve Altmetrics index；on the other hand,we need to construct
open and interoperable data infrastructure and carry out necessary domestic and international
collaboration.