Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship. It goes beyond traditional citation-based indicators and raw usage factors such as downloads or click-through numbers. Instead it explores readership, diffusion and reuse indicators that can be tracked via blogs, social media, peer production systems, collaborative annotation tools, including social bookmarking and reference management services. Read more about Altmetrics in Altmetrics manifesto.
Noteworthy altmetrics tools and services:
ACUMEN is a European research collaboration aimed at understanding the ways in which researches are evaluated by their peers and by institutions and at assessing how the science system can be improved and enchanced. This FP7 project is a cooperation amont nine European research institutes.
Mendeley is an online research-collaboration platform and academic database. Mendeley's metrics include how often papers are downloaded, shared with colleagues, and commented on.
Altmetric tracks mentions of scholarly works on social media sites, scholarly bookmarking services and in science news outlets.
The Altmetric Explore is a commerical product that measures the attention that scholarly articles receive online.
Altmetric collects the relevant discussions around each article from Twitter, Facebook, science blogs, mainstream news outlets and other sources. Each article is given a score that measures the quantity & quality of attention it has received. The Altmetric Explore can also show demographics such as country and professional occupation for the social network users mentioning each paper.
The Altmetric Bookmarklet instantly gets article-level metrics for any recent paper.
Clarivate's Data Citation Index (DCI) provides a single point of access to quality research data from repositories across disciplines and around the world. Scholars can discover, attribute, and receive credit for the creation of scholarly digital research data.
Careless, J. (2013). Altmetrics 101: A Primer. Information Today
Arbesman, S. (2012, January 9). New Ways to Measure Science. Wired Science Blogs.
Howard, J. (2012, February 28). Tracking scholarly influence beyond the impact factor. Chronicle of Higher Education.
Luther, J. (2012, July 25). Altmetrics: trying to fill the gap. The Scholarly Kitchen.
