LibGuides: Metrics, Citations, and Impact Factors: Altmetrics

Altmetrics measure impact in ways traditional citation counts and impact factors don't. This can include social media buzz, usage statistics, follower counts, and more. They can also assess the impact of other research outputs like data sets, software, posters and presentations, and videos. They can also provide information on the breadth and composition of your audience.

Altmetrics aren't meant to replace traditional measures, but complement them. They can help gauge the immediate impact of your work, before enough time has passed for formal citations. They are measures of attention, not necessarily quality.

Examples of Altmetrics

Social media mentions, shares, comments, and followers
Page views and download counts from Digital Commons, PubMed, arXiv, SSRN, Figshare, GitHub, ICPSR, Slideshare, etc.
Citations from GoogleScholar, Data Citation Index, etc.
Bookmarks on Mendeley, CiteULike, Delicious
Media coverage, scholarly blog posts, and podcast mentions
Ratings on Amazon or GoodReads
Views on YouTube or Vimeo, as well as likes/dislikes, comments, and shares

What Are Altmetrics? A detailed overview of what altmetrics are, who uses them, and where and how to find them.
Altmetrics Bibliography The Altmetrics Bibliography includes selected English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding altmetrics.
The 30-Day Impact Challenge This free ebook is a compilation of popular Impact Challenge blog series that teaches how to supercharge research impact by conquering social media, boosting readership and citations by getting work online, and staying atop your field’s latest developments with automated alerts.

Altmetric Badges Allows researchers to create and embed Altmetric badges into their websites that showcase the shares and mentions of their research--before enough time has passed for it to generate citations.
Altmetric Bookmarklet Altmetric It is a free bookmarklet that watches social media sites, newspapers, and magazines for any mentions of scholarly articles. Click on the bookmarklet while viewing a paper and you'll see a box pop-up containing information about the article from Altmetric. Works on papers from PubMed, arXiv, or that have a DOI.

ALM Reports ALM Reports is a reporting tool for researchers, research institutions, and funders to pull the latest article-level metrics (ALM) – measurements of the overall performance and reach of research articles – published by PLOS.
ImpactStory ImpactStory allows you to create a free profile to explore and share the diverse impacts of all you research products--traditional ones like journal articles, but also alternative products like blog posts, datasets, and software. Impactstory then gathers and reports altmetrics and traditional citations for each product. Metrics are displayed as percentiles relative to similar products.
Kudos Kudos is a web-based service that helps researchers and their institutions and funders increase the visibility and impact of their publications. Kudos also enables researchers to track the effect of their actions against a wide range of metrics, including share referrals, click throughs, publication views, downloads, the Altmetric score, and the number of citations in Web of Science.
Mendeley Mendeley is a free reference management tool for reaearchers to organize, share, and discover research. Users can use the Stats tab to discover information about the readership of papers they upload, including number, location, discipline, and career status of their readers.
PaperCritic PaperCritic offers researchers a way to monitor all types of feedback about their scientific work, as well as allowing everyone to easily review the work of others, in a fully open and transparent environment. PaperCritic is powered by the Mendeley API that provides all the publication details and connects your PaperCritic and Mendeley accounts.
PLoS Impact Explorer This page mashes up alt-metrics data from Altmetric with articles from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Check which articles are seeing the most buzz from social media sites, newspapers and in online reference managers.
Plum Analytics Plum Analytics collects impact metrics in 5 major categories: usage, captures, mentions, social media, and citations. It tracks more than 20 different types of artifacts, including journal articles, books, videos, presentations, conference proceedings, datasets, source code, cases, and more.

Tips for Using Altmetrics to Support Professional Advancement

Context is important! Rather than just listing a bunch of statistics on your CV or tenure dossier, explain what they mean. Provide a qualitative explanation to back up your quantitative data.

Instead of merely stating that your paper was the subject of 14 blog posts, explain that this puts it in the 98th percentile of all scientific papers published in 2015.
Instead of saying that your article was mentioned on Twitter 153 times, explain that the hashtag was the third most popular trending topic on the site from June 6-9, 2014.

Include metrics that document the types of impact you want to showcase, rather than including every possible statistic you can find.

If you want to document scholarly impact, then share information about Mendeley bookmarks (and the demographics of those bookmarking your research), reviews on F1000, or Digital Commons downloads from other universities.
If you want to show that your work enjoyed a lot of public attention, then include Facebook shares, retweets, Wikipedia citations, blog hits, and so on.

Being selective with your statistics will help them make more impact, instead of overwhelming your audience with numbers.

Metrics, Citations, and Impact Factors

Altmetrics in Library Resources

PlumPrint

Altmetric

Sources for Altmetrics

Tips for Using Altmetrics to Support Professional Advancement