Guides: Assessing Research Impact: Altmetrics

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What are Altmetrics?

For decades the impact of research has been measured primarily through counting and analyzing the number of citations to a given author, research paper, or journal referenced in other researchers' peer-reviewed publications, often referred to as bibliometrics. Altmetrics (short for alternative metrics) is a collection of diverse tools and methods that attempts to analyze broader impact through leveraging data from social media, news, online research communities, and other informal publications not subject to peer review.

On this page you will find tools and websites that will help you to gain a broader understanding of altmetrics. These tools may assist you in understanding the impact of your own or others' peer-reviewed research.

Resources for Gathering Altmetrics

The following tools and websites are provided as a way to better understand how altmetrics can be used to assess the impact of research.

Scopus This link opens in a new window
In addition to traditional metrics data, Scopus also provides access at the article level to PlumX Analytics. PlumX is an altmetrics tools that shows the number of times an article has been reference in social media, or downloaded in a variety of research databases.

Altmetric Bookmarklet for Researchers
Drag the bookmarklet to your favorites bar, link to a research article and click the button! See how many times the article has been mentioned on Twitter, or read on Mendeley and CiteULike. Altmetric also assigns an "Attention Score" and compares the article to other research mentioned through the same social media outlets.
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Resources to Learn more about Altmetrics

The following research guides and articles will help you to understand altmetrics and to critique its use in assessing research.

University of Pittsburg "What are Altmetics?" Guide
A great introduction to the topic including examples of how altmetrics can be leveraged in tenure and promotion.
Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services.
Thelwall, M., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2013). Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services. PloS one, 8(5), e64841.
Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact
Priem, J., Piwowar, H. A., & Hemminger, B. M. (2012). Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact. arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.4745.
Altmetrics: an analysis of the state-of-the-art in measuring research impact on social media.
Erdt, M., Nagarajan, A., Sin, S. C. J., & Theng, Y. L. (2016). Altmetrics: an analysis of the state-of-the-art in measuring research impact on social media. Scientometrics, 109(2), 1117-1166.