Research Guides: Measuring Research Impact: Altmetrics

Altmetrics

For decades, scholars - and those who evaluate them - had a limited set of metrics to measure the impact of their work. As scholarship has moved into the digital realm, new opportunities to track its reach and utility have arisen.

Altmetrics, or “alternative metrics,” is a group of new methods for measuring the use and importance of scholarly research, particularly in the sciences. As opposed to more traditional bibliometrics (such as Journal Impact Factor), altmetrics provide article-level data and take into account new electronic interactions and usage, such as number of page views and downloads from a publisher's site, repository views, or discussions generated in online venues such as Twitter or blogs. While altmetrics are meant to supplement and not replace traditional metrics, many believe that article-level metrics help provide a more realistic reflection of the impact of a scholar's work.

Metrics Examples:

Usage - clicks, downloads, views, library holdings, video plays
Captures - bookmarks, code forks, favorites, readers, watchers
Mentions - blog posts, comments, reviews, attributions
Social media -likes, shares, Tweets
Citations - PubMed Central, Scopus, USPTO

From the artifacts
abstracts
articles
audio
bibliographies
blog posts
books
book chapters
cases
clinical trials
conference papers
corrections
datasets
expert opinions
figures
file sets
government documents
images
interviews
issues
journals
letters
manuscripts
maps
media
musical scores
newsletters
papers
patents
posters
preprints
presentations
press releases
reference
reports
retractions
reviews
source code
speeches
syllabi
theses / dissertations
videos
volumes
web resources

(Courtesy of PlumX)

Altmetric.com -- A commercial venture that provides a suite of tools to researchers, authors, and publishers to understand and apply open metrics to articles and collections of articles. CMU Library does not have its licensing, However, it has free tools for individual researchers.
ImpactStory -- Impactstory is an open-source, web-based tool that helps scientists explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products—from traditional ones like journal articles to emerging products like blog posts and datasets.
PaperCritic -- PaperCritic allows users to share and review scholarly publications, and also tracks mentions of articles on Twitter.
PLoS Impact Explorer -- This tool enables the examination of conversations related to papers published by the Public Library of Science. Data on tweets, Facebook pages, Google posts, news mentions, and blogging activity is offered.
Plum Analytics -- Plum Analytics categorizes metrics into five separate types: Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media, and Citations, then aggregates this output into a researcher graph.
ResearchGate -- ResearchGate allows sharing of publications between users and tracking of views, downloads, and citations.

Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) -- SSRN offers users metrics for abstract views, downloads, and download rank, etc.
ResearchGate -- A free and popular academic peer network
Mendeley -- A peer network that combines the discoverability of peer networks with the organizational structure of a citation management program.
Academia.edu -- Provides researchers "analytics" based on all activity generated relative to their profiles and/or documents within the last 30 or 60 days.
CiteULike -- A social bookmarking site for researchers to save and organize citations of interest.
Faculty of 1000 -- A post peer review service that highlights articles in the fields of biology and medicine