What is Almterics?
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.
Tools
Journals published by Springer, Wiley, Nature Publishing Group, and select Elsevier publications are now including altmetric tabs on individual articles.
- Almetric BookmarkletFree bookmarklet that displays cites, saves, links, and social media mentions for individual articles.
- Impact StoryA paid subscription designed for individual authors. Includes metrics for data sets, slide decks, websites, and other nontraditional publications.
- Nature Publishing GroupAll journals in the Nature Publishing Group have a tab for article level metrics powered by Almetric.com
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS provides their own article level metrics for all publications.
- Publish or PerishA downloadable software program that uses Google Scholar data to create a impact profile for individual authors.
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.
Using Almetric Bookmarklet
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.
- The Bookmarklet only works on pages containing a DOI
- It only supports publishers who embed Google Scholar friendly citation metadata on their pages by default
- Twitter mentions are only available for articles published since July 2011
Further Reading
- Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web ServicesAn article from PLOS that found, "statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence."
- Rise of 'Altmetrics' Revives Questions About How to Measure Impact of ResearchFrom the Chronicle of Higher Education, 2013
- National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Altmetrics InitiativeNISO's initiative includes a white paper, bibliography, and toolkit
- Do almetrics point to the broader impact of research?2014 journal article from the Journal of Informetrics which discusses benefits and disadvantages for measuring impact.
License
This work by Carolyn Caffrey Gardner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.