On Developing Extraction Rules for Mining Informal Scientific References from Altmetric Data Sources

Altmetrics measure scientific impact outside of traditional scientific literature. We identify mentions of scientific research or entities like researchers, academic or research organizations in a corpus containing blogs, articles, news items etc. We first manually analyse the corpus for patterns of such informal mentions and then apply text mining techniques by developing extraction rules for mining informal mentions. We apply them to our development corpus and present our results. This work takes us closer to developing concrete altmetrics for determining research impact on news and public discourse ultimately leading to measuring impact of scientific research on government policies.