Research Guides: Research Impact, Citation Analysis & Altmetrics: Altmetrics

Introduction

altmetrics

n. Tools used to assess the impact of scholarly articles based on alternative online measures such as bookmarks, links, blog posts, and tweets. Also: alt-metrics. [Alternative + metrics.]

Quote: Luckily, there is a growing movement within the scientific establishment to better measure and reward all the different ways that people contribute to the messy and complex process of scientific progress. This movement has begun to gather loosely around the banner of "altmetrics," which was born out of a simple recognition: Many of the traditional measurements are too slow or simplistic to keep pace with today's internet-age science.

—Samuel Arbesman, "New Ways to Measure Science," Wired Science, January 9, 2012

Resources & Altmetrics Tools

Altmetric Explorer
"We've created and maintain a cluster of servers that watch social media sites, newspapers and magazines for any mentions of scholarly articles.

In mid January 2012 we were tracking approximately three thousand unique papers a day. We have broad coverage and are getting better every month - we can track articles from hundreds of different publishers, preprint databases and institutional repositories. If somebody has recently tweeted, blogged or posted a public link to your paper then we quite possibly know about it.

We clean up the data, disambiguate articles and give each one an Altmetric score..."
altmetrics
"No one can read everything. We rely on filters to make sense of the scholarly literature, but the narrow, traditional filters are being swamped. However, the growth of new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem. We call for more tools and research based on altmetrics."
...
"With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and bookmarks in a week."
ImpactStory
Tell the full story of your research impact.
ImpactStory aggregates altmetrics: diverse impacts from your articles, datasets, blog posts, and more.
LinkedIn altmetrics group
"This group is for hackers, scientists, librarians, policy makers and publishers interested in new ways to measure scholarly impact. altmetrics go beyond citation-based metrics and simple usage factors and look at the opportunities the Web offers to rethink the notion of "impact" and its measurement."
Mendeley altmetrics group
"The aim of this group is to discuss new approaches to the assessment of scholarly impact based on new metrics. altmetrics go beyond traditional citation-based indicators as well as raw usage factors (such as downloads or click-through rates) in that they focus on readership, diffusion and reuse indicators that can be tracked via blogs, social media, peer production systems, collaborative annotation tools (including social bookmarking and reference management services)."
PLoS Impact Explorer
The PLoS Impact Explorer allows you to browse the conversations collected by altmetric.com for papers published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS).
Plum Analytics
"Plum is building the next generation of research metrics for scholarly research.

Metrics are captured and correlated at the group / collection level (e.g., lab, department, museum, journal, etc.)

We categorize metrics into 5 separate types: Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media, and Citations. Examples of each type are:
*Usage - Downloads, views, book holdings, ILL, document delivery
*Captures - Favorites, bookmarks, saves, readers, groups, watchers
*Mentions - blog posts, news stories, Wikipedia articles, comments, reviews
*Social media - Tweets, +1's, likes, shares, ratings
*Citations - PubMed, Scopus, patents "
Twitter results for #altmetrics