Introduction

This chapter will guide readers through the myriad of tools and resources that are available to help promote, share and measure scholarly output. It describes the catalogue of tools and techniques that LIS professionals can use themselves or teach to academics and their support staff to help them get their research out into the world. The tools and technologies can be divided into a number of categories, including academic networking, audio and visual technologies, content hosting and tools for measurement. Within these categories the tools are listed in alphabetical order. The list is by no means exhaustive, but looks at the key tools and discusses how some of them can be used.

One of the biggest difficulties in writing a chapter such as this is deciding which technologies and platforms to include. Technology is moving rapidly. This applies equally to altmetrics and scholarly communications, and by the time this book is published there will be even more tools and resources available. While the book's theme is altmetrics and the core altmetric tools, i.e. those that collate, measure and report scholarly and other forms of communication, this chapter also looks at the many other tools available for the communication of research. Some tools may be of use to those working in the sciences, others more applicable to medicine, and there will be much cross-over. There will be tools that you have already read about and used, but plenty of new ones to discover. While this book sets out to identify new ways of using some of these technologies, readers will, no doubt, come up with many others.

An introduction to scholarly communication and measurement tools

There are several useful ways to stay up to date with the discussion and developments around altmetrics, and these are listed in the web resources list at the end of this chapter. The chapter also looks at the implications of using some of these tools and the ethics and issues that LIS professionals and academics face in choosing where to invest their time and energy.