What are altmetrics?

Definition

"Altmetrics are new metrics proposed as an alternative to the widely used journal impact factor and personal citation indices like the h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010,[1][2] as a generalization of article level metrics,[3] and has its roots in the twitter #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.[4] Altmetrics cover not just citation counts, but also other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, downloads, or mentions in social media and news media."

From & See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altmetrics

The concept has been around for 5+ years now, and is slowly gaining ground, especially with those who want to trace the impact of their writings on the social web. (Twitter, Mendeley, blogs etc. - shares basically). The argument is that online sharing does not invoke the same behaviours as traditional methods and consequently needs its own set of metrics. There are different characteristics to the behaviours and these generate different data that that traditionally collated by impact factor generators, therefore creating the need for a new approach to measuring impact > Altmetrics.

For example Elsevier clusters like kinds of activity for this type of reporting, rather than compressing all activities into one.



Image from: http://altmetrics.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/four-ways-to-measure-impact-copy.png

Leaders in the field include

• Altmetrics
• Plum
• PLOS (code)
• http://impactstory.org - free (plugs into Google Scholar My Citations)

Some of these interact with other services such as Vivo, Profiles, SciVal, Experts, and Figshare.

• Altmetrics are starting to appear in subscription resources as sub products or reports.
• Altmetrics are a way for crowd sourced / funded projects. to measure their success in reaching their targets. They enable researchers to be able to assess whether they are reaching the right market / population with outreach and gives context to the research / paper.
• Recent trends include tweetable abstract submissions

Spaces to watch

• growkudos.com
• ORCID
• Counter (use in Institutional Repositories).
• Altmetric explorer - a web application that helps you see the attention your publications are getting.

Read more at: http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/


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