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.
Directory of tools to measure
alternative forms of research impact metrics
Altmetric 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 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.
Impactstory 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