Psychological dependencies; The hidden dependencies of Altmetrics

While we rely upon the technical dependencies in large regards, and these are extremely important, there is another side of Altmetrics dependencies, those of the humans who actually create the metrics. The machines, the websites, APIs, and tools that capture Altmetrics, and even the Altmetrics themselves, are ultimately designed to measure human behavior. And understanding these human behaviors will ultimately be what leads to a better understanding of Altmetrics and scientificproductivity more generally. A lack of DOIs in a particular area does lead to certain biases and it is important to identify those; but likely stronger are those biases built into the psychology of the people the Altmetrics measure. The technical dependencies affect how we, the human, interacts with it. Twitter’s 140 character limit is a technical dependency, but it also changes the way the psychology happens on the platform. Accurate measurements are important, but even more crucial is to understand what we are measuring and to make sure it is what we want to be measuring (Buttliere, 2017).