Research Guides: Research Impact & Scholarly Credentials: Altmetrics

What are Altmetrics?

Altmetrics are measures of research impact that supplement citations. They measure the wider, societal impacts of scholarly works by tracking how they are discussed, shared, saved, read, and reused by scholars and the public. Altmetrics are sourced from many web platforms and medias: number of downloads, shares, and mentions in venues such as institutional repositories, government documents, social media, and web-based reference managers like Mendeley and Zotero.

They are useful supplementary measures of impact, best used in tandem with traditional measures like citation analysis. Combined, these metrics can illustrate the broad impact of your work.

Popular Tools to Track Altmetrics

Altmetric
A web-based platform that allows users to track, search, and measure the conversations about their research happening online.

Offers a free bookmarklet or subscription portal that presents the “quantitative measure of the attention that a scholarly article has received… derived from 3 main factors”: volume of mentions; source of the mention; and, author of the mention.

ImpactStory
Aggregates data from a number of resources into a profile that allows authors to consider all of their publications in one place.
Scholarometer
A freely available browser extension for Chrome and Firefox developed at Indiana University-Bloomington which uses Google Scholar to provide citation analysis data, including number of articles, number of citations, and h-index.
PlumX Metrics
Collects impact metrics in five categories: usage, captures, mentions, social media, and citations. Tracks data for research outputs including journal articles, books, videos, presentations, conference proceedings, datasets, source code, cases, and more.
figshare
figshare is a repository where users can make their research available in a manner that allows it to be easily cited, shared, and discovered. It tracks views and shares on a few social media platforms.

Pros and Cons Identified about these Kinds of Metrics

Pros

Gauges impact of research before it enters the citation cycle
Demonstrates impact in both the social and scholarly realm
Measures the impact of different types of scholarly or creative outputs (e.g., datasets or visual arts)

Cons