Altmetrics, Bibliometrics and Scholarly Impact

An early formative explanation of altmetrics that discusses some of the limitation of traditional metrics and offers altmetrics as an alternative.

The ASIS&T Bulletin special section on altmetrics presents alternative metrics as a new and critically needed approach to measuring the impact of scholarly research. With long-established citation-based metrics unable to capture the increasing variety of online references to a scholar’s work, alternative indicators offer a different view of the influence of that work.

Provides a brief introduction to altmetrics, provides a comparison with traditional altmetrics, and describes the growth of the altmetrics movement in science and education.

This brief article lists some important resources for tracking traditional bibliometrics and some for altmetrics. The list is selective rather than inclusive and is not completely representative of all the tools that are currently available.

Illuminate research impact with Altmetric data. Altmetric collects mentions of scholarly articles from all across the Web by gathering attention from newspapers, blogs, social media, and more. In minutes, you can bring Altmetric data to your journal platform or application with embeddable badges.

A growing directory of noteworthy altmetrics apps, including ImpactStory, MeterReader, ScienceCard, PLOS Impact Explorer, PaperCritic, Crowdometer.

CrowdoMeter is a web service that displays tweets linking to scientific articles, and allows users to add semantic information. CrowdoMeter uses a subset of the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO), an ontology for the characterization of citations, both factually and rhetorically. The results of this crowdsourcing effort are displayed in real-time.

Formerly known as Total Impact, Impact Story is a free open source tool designed to support URL-based publishing through the aggregation of online altmetrics. Users create collections of materials through online identifiers, such as Google Scholar Profiles, DOIs, and PubMed IDs. Impact Story uses more than a dozen APIs to search for metrics on these collected items, with sources ranging from popular social media to scholarly tools like Mendeley and PLoS. Items are subsequently assigned impact categories, such as generally/highly “saved,” “cited,” “recommended,” or “discussed.” This resource is most useful for researchers publishing in nontraditional venues or with scholarship too new to have accumulated traditional citations. Not a comprehensive source for tracing Web impact.

Public Library of Science (PLoS) has emerged as the leading open access journal repository, in part due to its high traditional impact factors. However, PLoS offers an alternative to traditional impact in the form of Article Level Metrics, which track the influence of individual PLoS articles, from times downloaded to mentions in social media and blogs. PLoS also tracks internal article metrics, including comments, notes, and ratings. While a valuable resource for impact, only PLoS articles benefit from its metrics. Nevertheless, this resource represents an important new avenue for metrics, which future publishers will likely replicate. Available for free online

Research output is hosted on multiple platforms including publisher sites, discipline-based pre-print repositories, institutional repositories, and aggregated databases. In addition research is referenced on web sites such as such as faculty pages, department and lab sites, CVs, and abstracting and indexing databases. PlumX provides easy-to-embed metrics widgets on all of these types of resources.