Altmetrics
What Is It
There are different ways of measure research impact. The traditional way is to measure citation using Web of Science, Scopus and other citation enhanced databases. However, there are many complementary and alternative ways to track research impacts. These are collectively called metrics or altmetrics. They try to capture the presence in new scholarly venues, presence and impact in social media and other forms of online engagement, such as views, downloads, bookmarks, etc.
What Is It Used for
You can use altmetrics to illustrate the broader impact of your research on other scholars, the public, policy makers, practitioners, and more.
Different Types of Altmetrics
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) provides a classification of altmetrics, which fall in to the following categories with increasing engagement. 1
- Viewed: The activity of users accessing the article online, e.g.:
- number of views
- number of visits/visitors
- number of downloads
- Saved: The activity of saving publications and social bookmarking in online bibliography managers, which helps researchers organize papers for themselves as well as share them with others, e.g.:
- Discussed: Discussions and mentions of the research, e.g.:
- comments on articles
- blogs
- Wikipedia
- Recommended: The activity of a user formally endorsing the publication, e.g.:
- F1000Prime (biology & medicine)
- Cited: Documented formal citation in secondary sources, e.g. for number of references by Wikipedia:
- ImpactStory
- PLOS ONE
- Google Scholar also documents citations in different type of sources.
There are also other types of altmetrics, e.g.: number of likes, number of collaborators, number of shares in social media, number of library holdings and book ratings on Amazon.com and Goodreads.
Altmetric.com
Altmetric.com is a Digital Science company, which tracks and analyses the online activity around scholarly research outputs.The Altmetric Attention Score for a research
output provides an indicator of the amount of attention that it has received.
How the Almetric Attention Score is calculated.
Altmetric also offers a free a bookmarklet to add to your toolbar in your Internet browsers (Chrome, Firefox or Safari).
Altmetrics in DiVA
Publicly available altmetrics for each publication record in DiVA potentially include:
- number of full-text downloads
- number of visits
- Altmetric Attention Score from Altmetric.com
Altmetrics in Halmstad University's Staff Profile Pages
The publication records from DiVA that is added to your staff profile page include any available Altmetric Attention Score from Altmetric.com.
Short introductory video
Sources
This article is partly based on a work by Utrecht Unversity Library at libguides.library.uu.nl.
1. Lin, J.; Fenner, M. (2013). "Altmetrics in Evolution: Defining and Redefining the Ontology of Article-Level Metrics". Information Standards Quarterly 25 (2): 24. doi: 10.3789/isqv25no2.2013.04