Research Guides: Scholarly Impact Challenge: Challenge 8: Altmetrics

Introduction to Altmetrics

Some Background

The term altmetrics, coined in 2010 in altmetrics: a manifesto, is defined as “the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analyzing, and informing scholarship.” (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, and Neylon, 2010).

It’s easy to assume that altmetrics are all about social media (people tend to think of Twitter in particular), but that is only part of what they offer. By tracking links from all kinds of websites back to scholarly research, altmetrics can reveal references to and engagement with scholarship in the news, in policy documents, in syllabi, on scholarly blogs, and beyond.

This challenge introduces you to two tools that can give you insights into references to your work that go beyond citations: Altmetric and PlumX. Both are proprietary tools that search the web for "mentions" of research outputs, such as journal articles or book chapters, to show how readers are engaging with scholarly publications online. Mentions can appear in social media, scholarly blogs, news outlets, Wikipedia, citation managers like Mendeley, and more.

Popular Tools for Tracking Altmetrics

Altmetric.com
Altmetric.com is a data science company that tracks the reach of research across various nodes, which appear as colors on its telltale donut icon. It offers a downloadable bookmarklet, which allows you to "instantly see the Altmetric data for any publication with a DOI", as well as badges that can be embedded on webpages (you'll find them on some library databases), and an open API that you can use to query their rather sizeable database (more than 9 million) for research purposes.
PlumX Metrics
Plum Analytics is owned by Elsevier. Implementation of this product tends to be at the institutional level, with a widget available "to non-commercial open access journals and regional repositories, upon request and approval." PlumMetrics uses five categories--citations, usage, captures, mentions, and social media--to tell the impact story.
Impactstory
While other altmetric platforms measure impact at the article (or other deliverable) level, Impactstory focuses on the researcher. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Impactstory is an open-source website that helps researchers explore and share the the online impact of their research through individual profiles that list their publications, tracks mentions, and awards achievement badges to measure online impact. Impactstory profiles are tied to Twitter accounts and/or ORCID IDs.

Altmetrics for Alternate Forms of Research

GitHub Metrics - GitHub captures metrics on code shared in their repositories, including stars (user bookmarks), forks (user copies), and pull requests (user suggestions for changes to the code).
Slideshare - If you have a Slideshare profile, you can access metrics on your uploaded content including views, actions (likes, downloads, comments, emails), and shares to Facebook or LinkedIn.
Vimeo and YouTube metrics - Both Vimeo and YouTube track the number of views, likes, and comments on content uploaded to the sites.

Activities

Choose one of the following exercises to begin to familiarize yourself with altmetrics:

Activity 1 : Explore altmetric.com. Begin by downloading the bookmarklet. Then, find an article in your discipline and use the bookmarklet to explore any altmetrics that exist for that article. Does your discipline use altmetrics? If so, how?

Activity 2: Track your own altmetrics. If you are a published author and you want to track your own altmetrics, set up an Impact Story profile--this requires a Twitter account and, ideally, an ORCID ID. Visit https://profiles.impactstory.org/ and follow the prompts.

License Statement

Content for this challenge of the Scholarly Impact Challenge has been derived from the University of Michigan's Research Impact Challenge and the University of Minnesota's Research Impact Challenge. Both challenges are licensed CC BY 4.0.

Scholarly Impact Challenge

This guide contains 10 challenges for scholars to better understand and manage their online scholarly presence, as well as the impact and reach of their research.