LibGuides: Measuring Research Impact: Altmetrics

What are Altmetrics?

Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, is "the study and use of scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments" (Priem, Groth, and Taraborelli 2012). Altmetrics utilize new sources of data, based on online activity, to measure the impact of journals, authors and articles.

Altmetrics are meant to compliment, not replace, traditional measures of impact.

Examples of altmetrics include:

Number of times an article has been viewed or downloaded from a journal website, or database
Number of times an article has been exported to a citation manager
Number of times an article has been emailed or shared on Facebook or Twitter
Mentions in the mainstream media

Altmetrics offer possible advantages over traditional citations because they:

Are generated rapidly
Capture data from a variety of sources both within and beyond the scholarly community
Are often gathered from open source web services, which means they can be verified

The preceding statements were adapted from Altmetrics: A Manifesto, Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology, PLoS Altmetrics Collection, and Plum Analytics.

Altmetric page for article published in British Medical Journal

Find Altmetrics

Altmetric
Altmetric tracks and analyzes online activity such as mainstream media, social media and publisher download data, for mentions of scholarly literature. This data is used to calculate an Altmetric score, which is a measure of the quality and quantity of attention that an article has received. Several publishers, including Nature Publishing Group, Wiley Online Library, Springer, BioMed Central and JAMA, provide the Altmetric score. Look for the Altmetric icon when viewing articles on a publisher's site, or install the Almetric bookmarklet in your browser, which enables you to get Almetric details when viewing articles in PubMed, and on pages with a digital object identifier (DOI).
Dimensions
Dimensions is a discovery and analytics platform that provides article-level metrics, including number of citations, Relative Citation Ratio and altmetrics, for more than 90 million publications.

CINAHL
This database indexes nursing, consumer health, and allied health journals, trade publications, dissertations and books. CINAHL provides article-level metrics, such as number of abstract views or mentions on Twitter, from Plum Analytics, a company that aggregates and evaluates altmetrics. Look for the PlumX Metrics icon and link when viewing a list of results in CINAHL.

Impactstory
Impactstory is a web-based tool that gathers metrics for research products (articles, data sets, slides, etc.) from a variety of sources, including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Mendeley, PubMed Central, and Scopus. An individual's Impactstory profile supplies raw metrics and 'badges' for each research product. The badges provide context for the metrics by indicating how a product has performed in both the scholarly and public arenas, compared to similar products in the same discipline.
NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS)
If you submitted an article to PubMed Central via the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system, then you can view the number of users who have accessed your article once the article is publicly available in PubMed Central (PMC). Data is only available for articles submitted through NIHMS. Statistics are limited to PMC usage and do not include access from a publisher's site or anywhere else the article may be posted. To find PMC access statistics in NIHMS, select the Available in PMC tab, then click the link in the Status column.
PLOS Article-Level Metrics
PLOS provides article-level metrics, such as number of views and downloads, for articles published in its journals. When viewing an article, look for the metrics box in the upper right-hand corner. ALM Reports allows you to visualize metrics for a set of up to 500 PLOS articles.

SCOPUS
This interdisciplinary database indexes journals, conference proceedings, trade publications and books in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. Scopus provides article-level metrics, such as number of abstract views or mentions on Twitter, from Plum Analytics, a company that aggregates and evaluates altmetrics. Look for article-level metrics in the Metrics box in the right-hand column on an article's details page.

Measuring Research Impact

What are Altmetrics?

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