What Are Altmetrics?
Citations in the scholarly literature don't capture the full scope of the impact of research and researchers. In recent years, a variety of ways to track the impact of research beyond traditional bibliometrics have emerged to try to help quantify impact outside of academic spaces. Broadly, these are referred to as alternative metrics, or altmetrics.
Altmetrics may include:
- Mentions of an article outside the peer-reviewed literature, such as in the news, in policy documents, in patents, and on social media
- Post-publication peer reviews
- Online views, downloads, bookmarks, etc.
Current accepted altmetric measures focus on individual research outputs (a journal article, book, dataset, etc.), not researchers or journals. Two commonly used altmetrics, the Altmetric Attention Score and PlumX Analytics, are described below.
Altmetric Attention Score
The Altmetric Attention Score is a measure of the attention an article has received outside citations in scholarly publications. The score is displayed in a multicolored donut, with different colors representing mentions in different sources.
(From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-022-00803-9/metrics on October 16, 2023.)
Altmetric scores factor mentions from the following sources:
- News
- Blogs
- Policy Documents
- Patents
- Wikipedia
- Publons, Pubpeer, F1000
- Open Syllabus
- Twitter/X, Facebook, Reddit, Stack Exchange, YouTube
- Historical data from LinkedIn (to 2014), Google+ (to 2019), Pinterest (to 2013), Weibo (to 2015)
The scores are weighted. News mentions are worth the most, followed by blogs, policy documents, patents, and Wikipedia. Social media mentions are worth the least. Scores may go down if posts are deleted.
Find an Altmetric Attention Score
Some publishers (e.g., Nature, Taylor and Francis) display Altmetric Scores for their journals' articles on their websites. You can also install Altmetric's bookmarklet on your browser to find the Altmetric Attention Score for any article.
Learn More: https://www.altmetric.com/
PlumX Analytics
PlumX doesn't provide a single score for an article, but instead provides a snapshot of an article's use across five traditional and altmetric domains:
- Citations - citations in the scholarly literature, patents, and policy documents
- Usage - online views, downloads, library holdings, etc.
- Captures - bookmarks, favorites, GitHub code forks, etc.
- Mentions - includes sources like news, blogs, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Reddit, YouTube, etc.
- Social Media - currently limited to Facebook
(From https://plu.mx/plum/a/?doi=10.1016/j.acap.2021.01.018&theme=plum-sciencedirect-theme&hideUsage=true on October 16, 2023.)
Find PlumX Analytics
PlumX Analytics can only be accessed from publishers or databases. Some places to find them include Science Direct, Mendeley, SSRN, and Digital Commons Institutional repositories (which includes UofL's ThinkIR!).
Learn More: https://plumanalytics.com/