Altmetrics refer to "alternative metrics" or "article-level metrics." As the internet accelerated dissemination of scholarly work, scholars wanted a way to evaluate a work's impact beyond the more traditional methods of citation counts and journal impact factors. Altmetrics attempts to fill that gap by using social media mentions, link backs, blogs, news outlet coverage, and other web metrics to measure the impact of a particular work. Altmetrics are especially well suited to datasets and types of scholarly work not covered by traditional metrics. As with other metrics, the Altmetric score doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the quality of the individual publication. It's always best to review the publication yourself and investigate mentions as need be.
Journals published by Springer, Wiley, Nature Publishing Group, and select Elsevier publications are now including altmetric tabs on individual articles.
In USC Libraries Main Search option an Altmetric button will now appear if/when there is altmetric data available for a given publication. The button is typically at the bottom of the record. By clicking on the altmetric button you will see what online activity or attention the work has received.
Altmetric Bookmarklet can be used in Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari. It is a free bookmark tool from Altmetric.org which creates other products for analyzing almetrics through paid subscriptions.Clicking the bookmarklet will display a colorful wheel containing the article score and additional information about where it was mentioned.
This work by Carolyn Caffrey Gardner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.