This chronological table covers significant events in scholarly communication leading us to the discussion of 'altmetrics' today. It also serves as useful list of references. Please leave me a comment if you feel anything important is missing from this table. 11 Jan 2013: V.2 reuploaded

1. This chronological table covers significant events in scholarly communication leading us to the discussion of 'altmetrics' today. It also serves as useful list of
references.
Metrics
Online Publishing
Research Evaluation
Bibliographic database (become synomical to citation indexes after the launch of Web of Science in 2000)
Year Month Metrics Event Note
The world's first scholarly journal(s) was published: Philosophical Transactions (UK)/ Journal de
1665
Scavans (France).
1927 Gross & Gross conducted citation analysis and create a ranking list for important chemistry journals.
1955 10 Eugene Garfield developed Science Citation Index and launched Institute for Scientific Information.
Japan Information Centre of Science and Technology was established under the Science and
1957 Technology Agency. The aim was to collect and classify science and technology information that was
calculating fast, and to efficiently provide the information to users when needed.
1963 ISI published the first Science Citation Index on 1961 data.
1965 7 Price proposed the idea to evaluate research based on bibliographical information.
1969 Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES), a citation index for physics, was developed.
1971 Medline, a literature database for Medicines, was published in the US.
1975 Impact Factor
The first Journal Citation Report was published from ISI, which enable the calculation of Impact Factor.
1976 10 JOIS-I, online information search engine was developed and published in Japan.
American Psychological Association decided to move some of the contents of PsycINFO to digital form
1978
only, which created large amount of backlogs that took a long time for them to resolve. 10,000 records
were included by 1995. (PsychINFO is an abstract database published since 1967).
1986 Research Assessment Exercise was rolled out in the UK.
Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) developed a digital platform to archive
1991 8
preprint research papers in Physics (xxx.lanl.govga). It was renamed as arXiv.org in 1999.

2. Kitasato University in Japan started to measure their researchers' productivity based on Impact Factor
↓Misuse of Impact
1993 of the journals their articles were published in, and used the information for allocating research
Factor
budget.
S. Yamazaki published an article 'Research activities in life sciences in Japan' ranking Japanese
1994 2
universities vased on produced article per head in 1989.
Faculties of the School of Science at Nagoya University in Japan were required to submit a list of
1994
articles published since 1980 and cited more than 10 times.
1995 Highwire Press was launched and started to provide publishers the platform for online publishing.
↓Online publishing
1995 Andrew W. Mellon launched JSTOR. Served as digital library for academic literatures from 1997.
PubMed, free literature database based on Medline, was launched. PubMed is maintained by United
1996 1
States National Library of Medicine at はNational Institutes of Health.
Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, developed the link analysis algorithm, PageRank. It set the
1996 3 PageRank
principal that the more linked (referred) is the more important.
1996 Atypon, online publishing platform, was launched.
Academic Press launched a commercial online publishing platform for journals: The International
1997
Digital Electronic Access Library (IDEAL).
CiteSeer, a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers was developed
1997
and made available. It was replaced with CiteSeerX in 2008.
Garfield warned about the "misuse in evaluating individuals" because there is "a wide variation from
1998 6
article to article within a single journal. ↓Online usage of journal
1998 12 Elsevier released Science Direct, an online collections of published scientific research. articles
1998 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) launched Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources ↓Open Access
1999 10 Science published an essay criticising Impact Factor by Georg Franck.
Japan's databases for medical research articles, 'Ichushi Web' and 'Ichushi Personal Web', were
2000 4
released.
Reed Elsevier purchased Harcourt General. Following this, Elsevier started to sell IDEAL of Academic
2000 10
Press.
2000 Web of Science, a web version of Citation Index, was released for sale.
CrossRef, an official Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Registration Agency of the International DOI
2000
Foundation, was launched.
2001 7 arXive.org moved to Cornell University from LANL with its founder, Paul Ginsparg.
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), a public statement of principles relating to open access to the
2001 12
research literature was stated.

3. 2001 EBSCO launched MetaPress, a publishing platform.
Faculty of 1000 launched F1000 Prime. It identifies and recommends the most important articles in
2002 F1000 Prime ↓Post peer-review
biology and medical research publications.
Seisaku Kagaku Kenkyujo, now National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, published a report
2003 3 on the comprehensive evaluation of the state of science and technology policy of the Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science in Japan.
2003 4 Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
A statement, Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities,
2003 10
emerged from a conference on open access hosted in Berlin by the Max Planck Society.
The world's first university ranking, Academic Ranking of World Universities, also known as Shanghai
2003 Ranking, was compiled and published by the Shanghai Jiaotong University published. The ranking bases
on the data provided by ISI (now Thomson Reuters).
Japan mandated all universities (both private and national) to conduct certified evaluation to their
2004 4 faculties accreditation. This however did not include research achievements for Institutional Certified
Evaluation and Accreditation.
↓Searching for new
S. Harnad and T. Brody published an article suggestion the correlation between usage and citations for
2004 6 metrics other than
articles published in Open Access model.
citation based metrics
2004 9 Thomas V Perneger published an article suggesting new metrics based on article usage.
2004 11 Beta version of Google Scholar went live.
2004 12 Nature developed Connotea, a social bookmarking system.
2005 4 CiNii, a scholarly and academic information navigator, was launched in Japan.
Jorge E. Hirsch proposed a new metrics, h-index. The index attempts to measure both the productivity
2005 9 h-index
and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar.
"Guidelines for Assessment of Research and Development in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
2005 9 Science (revised draft)" was released in Japan. It used quantitative metrics for objective scientific
evaluation, but noted that the use of such data should be done with care.
2005 11 Elsevier started to sell SCOPUS. The product was developed in 2004.
Leo Egghe suggested a metrics called g-index that attempt to quantify scientific productivity based on
2006 1 g-index
publication record.
2006 1 J. Bollen, M. A. Rodriguez, H. Van de Sompel published journal ranking using PageRank algorithm.

4. 2006 2 Bibliographic search engine, JDreamII, was released in Japan.
↓ Standardising 'hit
2006 3 Usage COUNTER project released first Code of Practice.
counts'
Windows released Live Search Academic, a search engine for academic literatures. This service was
2006 4
ceased in May, 2008.
2006 7 Twitter launched
Publish or
2006 10 Ann-Wil Harzing developed a software, Publish or Perish, using Google Scholar's citation data.
Perish (PoP)
2006 12 PLoS ONE launched.
2006 Google incorporated citation counts on Google Scholar, in response to Live Search Academic.
BMJ published featured articles discussing pros and cons of Impact Factor: Finding your way around
2007 3
Impact Factor
2007 3 EBSCO and American Economic Association digitally published ECONLIT with full text.
Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West developed the Eigenfactor, which rate journals according to the
2007 5 Eigenfactor number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted to make a larger
contribution to the Eigenfactor than those from poorly ranked journals.
2007 8 Google Scholar started a program to digitize and host journal articles in agreement with publishers.
2008 4 National University Corporation Evaluation became mandatory in Japan.
Taraborelli, D published an article seeking for ways social bookmarking may contribute to scientific
2008 5
evaluations: 'Soft peer review: social software and distributed scientific evaluation' ↓ Social media metrics
Journal of Medical Internet Research started to collect, record, and display tweets mentioning the
2008 7
journal's articles.
Mendeley started to provide free online reference management system. Mendeley itself was
2008 8
established in 2007.
2008 9 Academia.edu, a social service for researchers to share their articles, was launched.
SCImago
SCImago Journal & Country Rank was released. Developed from Google PageRank, this indicator shows
2008 Journal &
the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996.
Country Rank
JCR started to also list immediacy index, cited-half life, Eigenfactor along with Impact Factor for each
2009 1
journal. 1

5. Article Level
2009 3 Metrics/ Article PLoS inaugurated a program to provide "article-level metrics" on every article across all journals.
Usage
2009 3 Thomson Reuters launched InCite, a commercial analysis tool for research evaluation.
2009 3 e-index Chun-Ting Zhang developed e-index to complement h-index for excess citations.
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) project was launched to resolve author name ambiguity
2009 12
issue. Various members of the research community including publishers, societies.
2009 Elsevier introduced SciVal Spotlight and SciVal Funding, performance planning and funding solutions.
Cornell University Library introduced a voluntary, collaborative business model to support arXiv.org,
2010 2 where the 200 institutions that download most from the repository were asked to make annual
contributions to help fund it.
"altmetrics: a manifesto" was posted on altmetrics.org. Altmetrics aims to measure Web-driven
2010 10 Altmetrics
scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked.
Total-impact, a project to make the impact of a wide range of research output including Facebook likes
2011 10
and tweets digitally visible was launched.
Andrea Michalek and Mike Buschman established Plum Analytics to help make research more
2011
assessable and accessible.
Peter Binfield left PLoS ONE to found Peer J, an Open Access journal founded by author membership
2012 5
fee.
Total-impact became ImpactStory with financial support from Sloan Foundation. ImpactStory is a free
2012 9
web app that gathers and display Altmetrics data of the specified article/dataset or alike.
Thomson Reuters announced that integration of the ORCID Registry across its Scientific Literature
2012 10
Ecosystem.
2012 10 IOP Publishing (IOP) made article level metrics available on 36 journals on IOPscience.
Nature intoroduced Article level metrics on twenty journals on nature.com. Article level metrics are
2012 10
available on research articles published since 2011 and are openly accessible to all.
PLOS One and altmetrics.org announced the launch of 'Altmetrics Collection' a forum to gather an
2012 11
emerging body of research for the further study and use of Altmetrics.

6. Thomson Reuters announced that InCites will become the main environment for all Thomson Reuters
2012 11
analytic functionality related to scientific literature.
eLife, new online only Open Access journal published its first issue. As 'Metrics', total views as well as
2012 12
Public Impact (Facebook and Tweets, data provided by ImpactStory) are displayed for each article.