South African gender-based violence researchers’ awareness and usage of bibliometrics and altmetrics in the context of open access scholarly publishing

Abstract

The traditional model of scholarly communication uses journals, databases, and conferences. With the onset of the digital age, there has been a change in the system of scholarly communication, creating new publishing models, such as open access and institutional repositories, which have emerged as important, scholarly communication models. The research questions addressed in this study investigated the value of using altmetrics, as opposed to traditional metrics for measuring the impact of publications by researchers into gender-based violence (GBV) within South Africa.