LibGuides: Research Impact Metrics & Visibility: Altmetrics

What are altmetrics?

Altmetrics are alternative metrics used to measure the impact of research. Altmetrics have the potential to "provide a broader, more diverse view of the impact of any piece of scholarship, to reflect the impact of the article itself, not its publication venue, to track impact outside the academy, to track the impact of influential but uncited work, and to track impact from sources that aren't peer-reviewed." (source: http://altmetrics.org/manifesto)

Altmetrics track research impact by quantifying:

usage - views, clicks, downloads, holdings, document delivery, ILL
captures - favorites, bookmarks, saves, readers
mentions - blog posts, Wikipedia articles, news stories, comments, reviews
social media - tweets, +1s, likes, mentions, shares, ratings
citation - Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed

Altmetrics tools

Bookmarklet
The bookmarklet lets you instantly get article level metrics for many recent articles, as long as it has a DOI. Metrics include mentions of scholarly articles from newspapers, blogs, social media, and more.
Scholarometer
A social platform that extends Google Scholar to facilitate scholarly citation analysis. This tool from Indiana University uses crowdsourced data to evaluate the impact of an author's publications. This impact metric can be compared across fields.
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Install the browser extension to use Scholarometer! After installation, you will see the Scholarometer panel at the top right-hand side of any Google Scholar profile page.
Altmetric
Tracks a range of sources by capturing and collating the disparate information to provide a single visually engaging and informative view of the online activity surrounding a scholarly content.
Plum Analytics (PlumX)
Available in Scopus, PlumX Metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with individual pieces of research output (articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, videos, presentations, datasets, source code, and more) in the online environment. These metrics are divided into five categories (Citations, Usage, Captures, Mentions, and Social Media) to help make sense of the huge amounts of data involved and to enable analysis by comparing like with like.
Impactstory
Collates altmetric information for a broad range of research outputs including traditional publications such as articles, as well as blog posts, datasets, and software. It can be used to build a profile that showcases the impact of these research outputs.
PLoS ALMs
PLoS Article-Level Metrics (ALMs) are quantifiable measures that document the many ways in which both scientists and the general public engage with published research. Gives info on total number of views, cited, saved, discussed on social media, etc.
Figshare
Allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner.
Newsflo
Measures an academic’s societal impact by uncovering relevant mentions of their research across tens of thousands of mass media outlets around the world.

Research Impact Metrics & Visibility

How to search Altmetric Explorer: An introductory guide for institutions

A growing directory of noteworthy altmetrics apps

10 tips for tweeting research A post from Nature Index that describes things to consider when posting about your research on social media

What are altmetrics?

Altmetrics tools