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Altmetrics

An increasing number of researchers are using altmetrics to help document the varied impacts of their work in their CVs, tenure & promotion dossiers, and grant and job applications. Altmetrics for Professional Advancement provides information from Duke University librarians on how to use altmetrics in your CV, dossier, grant application, personal website, etc.


Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, use the Social Web to generate new measures of scholarly impact. Examples of altmetrics include the number of:
  • Mentions on Facebook, Twitter or professional networking sites, e.g. ResearchGate
  • Comments in publisher-hosted spaces, e.g. PLOS or blogs
  • Mentions in the mainstream media
  • Social bookmarks on sites such as CiteULike
  • Exports to citation management programs e.g. Mendeley, Zotero

Advantages of altmetrics:

  • Fast: Altmetrics are generated and gathered immediately. Traditional citations take time to accumulate.
  • Diverse: Altmetrics capture data from a variety of sources, including the scholarly community, the media and the general public. Traditional impact measures only reflect the impact of a work within the academic setting. Moreover, some alternative measures looks beyond counts to content.
  • Open: Data is typically gathered from a variety of open source web services, which means that conclusions based on altmetrics can be verified by others.

Altmetrics are a burgeoning area of study and they are not meant to replace traditional measures of impact, but they do provide another way to assess research impact.

Altmetrics Directory
  • Directory of tools to measure alternative forms of research impact metrics


AltmetricAltmetric offers a free bookmarklet that allows you to view article-level metrics for the articles that you read online.

To get started, drag and drop the Altmetric bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar in your web browser.  Works for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Due to some limitations, the bookmarklet may not work for every article.

  • Altmetric Data Sources: Four main categories: Policy documents, mainstream media, social media, online reference manager and publisher download counts
  • Altmetric Attention Score: This number is a measure of the quality and quantity of attention that an article has received. The colors surrounding the number reflect the mix of sources where the article has been mentioned.
Plum AnalyticsPlum Analytics
  • Plum Analytics collects impact metrics in 5 categories: captures, usage, citations, mentions, and social media, for over 20 different types of artifacts including: journal articles, books, videos, presentations, datasets, source code, and more.
  • It collects metrics for individual research artifacts, but also for labs, departments and other groups.
  • This product requires a subscription and Mercer University currently does not have a subscription to this product. However, PlumX Metrics icons will appear in our EBSCO databases, including Search Everything, and will provide limited data.
Impact StoryImpactstory is a fee-for-service web-based tool developed in part by a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina. Impactstory provides metrics from a variety of sources and normalizes those metrics based on comparison sets. Impactstory provides metrics for journal articles, data sets, slides and other research products.

Here are some of the metrics that Impactstory collects:

  • Citations in Scopus
  • PDF downloads, or HTML views, from PLoS
  • Full text views and PDF downloads on PubMed Central
  • Readers who have added an article to their Mendeley library
  • Tweets

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