Altmetrics Challenges in Research Evaluation: A Thematic Analysis

Despite the advantages of altmetrics in research evaluation, it encounters many challenges as a nascent field impacted by web dynamism. The present study attempted to identify the challenges of employing altmetrics’ in evaluating research and to highlight some of the features that required evaluation and validation.
The present communication was a basic descriptive research, applying a qualitative thematic analysis method. It studies the research and theoretical works on citation and altmetric indicators in order to extract the indicators’ weaknesses and challenges.
The findings led to the identification of many challenges including possibility of indicator manipulation and false improvement, inability to differentiate between positive or negative credits, unbalanced coverage of materials, incompatibility, ambiguities and diversity in the sources of social web, biases, fluctuations, variable nature of social web, equating all citations, lack of standardization, inability to determine the usage type and contexts, and finally inability to measure the quality.
Although the altmetrics have many unique strengths that can boost citation analysis, it has several fundamental weaknesses regarding its concepts, services and resources that requires its cautious and conscious use, otherwise its premature and hasty usage would distort research evaluation results.