Scholarly Impact

What

As a researcher, you may wonder whether citation metrics tell the whole story of your research's impact. Are there other indicators beyond citation analysis that can be utilized to exhibit research impact? “Altmetrics” (or alternative metrics) constitute the “online footprint” of a work. They are gathered by scraping social media, Wikipedia, blogs, policy documents, news media, and grey literature for mentions as well as tracking interactions with your work through views, clicks, and downloads. Using altmetrics can help you gain a bigger picture of your work’s impact beyond academia. Altmetrics are meant to complement, not completely replace traditional citation metrics.

Applications

• Altmetric.com (Digital Science)
  • Set up Altmetric.com’s free Bookmarklet for Researchers to view your publication’s altmetrics.
  • Display “donut” visualizations of your altmetric scores on your professional web pages using Altmetric.com’s free badges for individual researchers. 
• Plum Analytics (Elsevier)
  • Collects impact metrics in 5 major 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.
  • Integrated in Scopus

Considerations

• Altmetrics tracks Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), publications which are not assigned a DOI cannot be tracked. Consider depositing your work in an open access scholarly repository or getting a DOI assigned to it.
• Like author and citation metrics, altmetrics, while useful, still carry significant limitations for measuring the public impact of research.