Research Guides: Research Impact Guide: Beyond Citations: Altmetrics

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Subjects: OER: Open (or Free) Educational Materials, Scholarly Communication

What are Altmetrics?

Alternative metrics, or altmetrics, are evidence of scholarship being discussed online. This includes links, shares, views, and downloads in social media, blogs, and other venues, which can demonstrate popular or societal impact in areas such as education, public policy, etc. Altmetrics are meant to complement more traditional article citation counts.

Understanding and Using Altmetrics

How to Use Altmetrics This site not only concisely explains altmetrics and where to find them, but also provides examples of HOW to use altmetrics in CVs, grant applications, tenure documentation, and more. (page provided by Altmetric)
Getting Started with Altmetrics: A Researcher's Guide from Scholastica
Altmetrics.org - The original 2010 manifesto on altmetrics, plus current news and events

Examples of Implementation

In choosing which metrics to report and how to report them, you must make decisions that best suit your work, your discipline, and your department. Altmetrics may be one element of telling your story; these resources will help you understand how to explain them and incorporate them into documentation.

How to Use Altmetrics to Showcase Engagement Efforts for Promotion and Tenure By Amy Rees, 18 Oct 2016. Suggests dossier areas and suggested language for highlighting altmetrics and demonstrating research impact in diverse ways. Illustrates relevant, concrete examples. Includes instructions for how to generate an altmetrics "badge," like a Plum Print or an Altmetric Donut, to place in a dossier or CV.
Examples: Researchers Who Have Used Altmetrics for Tenure & Grants "The Right Metrics for Generation Open: a guide to getting credit for Open Science" Stacy Konkiel, 24 October 2014, ImpactStory blog - Scroll down in this article to see three specific examples of how faculty have featured altmetrics in tenure and promotion dossiers or grant reporting.
A Guide to Using Altmetric Data in Your NIH Biosketch CV How to use altmetrics data in your NIH Biosketch CV to demonstrate impact, reach and engagement around your scholarly work. (Altmetric)

Tools

Dimensions.ai
In addition to citations from scholarly works and patents, Dimensions includes an article's Altmetric badge, showing social media and other kinds of engagement.

Dimensions and Altmetrics badges for an article in Dimensions.ai, showing citations and other forms of engagement

Image captured 8-Sep-2022 from Dimensions

With this bookmarklet installed in your browser, one click will display altmetric data for an article you're reading on the web (your own work or someone else's). Article must include a Digital Object Identifier, or DOI, for the bookmarklet to work. Also be aware that stats from Altmetric.com may only be accurate back to a 2011 publication date.

Altmetric Bookmarklet
"The Altmetric bookmarklet enables you to instantly see Altmetric data for any published research output with a DOI." Install easily to Chrome, Firefox, or Safari browser. Free.

Altmetric bookmarklet free browser plugin

Unpacking The Altmetric Black Box
This brief post highlights some confusion and concerns about the opaque algorithms used to calculate an Altmetric score.

If you know an article's DOI (Digital Object Identifier), you can use it to look up PlumX Metrics for that article for free. Just add the DOI to the end of this URL: https://plu.mx/a/?doi=

Example: https://plu.mx/a/?doi=10.1016/j.acalib.2014.02.003

Altmetrics Tools
A growing directory of noteworthy altmetrics apps

What It Is, Why It Matters

View full-size infographic from Animate Science

What Does This Really Tell Me?

Do altmetrics correlate with the quality of papers? A large-scale empirical study based on F1000Prime data
Lutz Bornmann, Robin Haunschild (2018)
Do altmetrics point to the broader impact of research? An overview of benefits and disadvantages of altmetrics
Lutz Bornmann (2014)
The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research: Results of an Experiment by Melissa Terras. Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 3, Summer 2012. "...if you want people to read your papers, make them open access, and let the community know (via blogs, twitter, etc.) where to get them."
Altmetric scores: An early indicator of research impact by Jenny Wooldridge and Mike B. King. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 2018. "We find the presence of altmetric data for the cited underpinning research to be highly correlated with peer review scores for societal impact."