After Dr. Starzl's death, PlumX was also able to reveal attention surrounding the website for Dr. Starzl's collection at the University of Pittsburgh (
plu.mx/pitt/a/RmXe14-wOrGRM5klMFu8C93NjX-LzD9lt2ocN87cri4/?display-tab=artifact-tweets). The tweets about Dr. Starzl that mentioned his website mourned his passing and pointed to his impressive body of work described on the website. This expression of grief and gratitude for the deceased scholar through the medium of social media was captured by PlumX. This reveals how altmetrics tools can be a way to reveal the legacy of a scholar's work.
Effect on Understanding Starzl’s Legacy
As with many researchers of great impact, Dr. Starzl was concerned with the way his achievements would be utilized after his death. During the course of his work with Pitt librarians, one of the major purposes he stated for donating his archives to the University was to ensure that his material would be available for future researchers to use and build upon. The work put in by multiple ULS departments to digitize, describe, and ingest his over 2,200 articles into the D-Scholarship institutional repository was the first major step towards achieving this goal. As much of the bulk of this work was completed in 2011 and 2012, before the library’s widespread adoption of altmetrics tools, this was done less as a way to help boost the metrics on his (already quite impactful) works, and more as a method of preserving his material in one singular, permanent location for easy reference and access. The import of the material into PlumX was a byproduct of the larger integration, and while the staff noted with interest what altmetrics said about his work, this discovery of Dr. Starzl's legacy and ongoing impact was not anticipated when we began the altmetrics project.
After his passing, the archival collection held at the Archives Service Center quickly came up as a topic of discussion, even being mentioned at his memorial service during a former colleague’s eulogy. While work on the physical collection is still ongoing as additional material in transferred from his office to the archives, the digitized articles in D-Scholarship serve as the most immediately publicly available portion of his papers. While data like the increased citations and social mentions in the wake of his death cannot be included as an official part of the archival collection, it can be captured and recorded in the collection's case file to help inform the work of the archivists. They see these spikes as evidence of which portions of the collection are of the most importance to researchers, even 50 years after he performed the world’s first successful liver transplant. It also helps put his work into the social context, helping archivists understand the conversations around their collection subjects and how their material can further contribute to the discourse.
Conclusion
While this paper, admittedly, references one (superstar) scholar whose body of work changed an entire field, the cases presented here show that alternative metrics can be applicable to understanding the ongoing use and legacy of a scholar's work. Even work published more than a decade prior can be used as a reference in a heated social media debate, and work as far back as the 1960s may experience an altmetrics surge.
Beyond just gathering numbers, however, altmetrics tools can help to see the legacy that a scholar leaves behind. An older work is used as the definitive reference in a heated debate on an important medical topic, and the infrequent but consistent referencing of a paper on social media can show its use in combating widespread or popular misinformation. After his passing, Dr. Starzl received social media mentions from hundreds of people across the world and in at least five different languages, and those are just the ones that reference his publications in some way. We know that Dr. Thomas E. Starzl was a legend in his field, and the social media reaction at his passing shows just how much of an impact he had on his field and the scholars in it.
We have provided just two examples of how altmetrics, specifically social media, may be meaningful for older works of scholarship, and we recognize that there may be many more examples beyond these. We invite our colleagues to share additional examples of how altmetrics can provide information about older works of scholarship.
In conclusion, this small case study provides two examples of ways that altmetrics can lend insight into the use of an older work of scholarship. The lack of altmetrics for older works has been cited as a drawback to using altmetrics tools \cite{Peters_2016,Kwok_2013}, and we acknowledge that older works do not benefit from the marketing and promotion that a newly published work may receive \cite{Bornmann_2014}. This lack of immediate information may cause older scholarship to be overlooked when creating altmetrics profile and services. However, we argue that altmetrics for older works should not be ignored; while they may not have numbers that are as high or as immediate as the newer works, altmetrics indicators can reveal interesting and informative situations where new meaning is given to older works. In fact, as this case study of Dr. Starzl's altmetrics profile shows, the altmetrics of an older paper are often cases where Crotty's distinction between sharing and an "informed comment" \cite{crotty2014altmetrics} are more clear: to revisit an older work and share it on social media, there must be something new or interesting about it to comment on, or it must be relevant to the ongoing discourse in some way. This interest can be helpful to a scholar who may want to revisit an old project, to archivists and librarians working on related material, or a comfort for scholars who want to share their memories of a late colleague's contributions to their field.