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"In growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web. Online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley each claim to store over 40 million articles (making them substantially larger than PubMed); as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a growing number tend scholarly blogs.
These new forms reflect and transmit scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero–where we can see and count it. That hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks–now, we can listen in. The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository–now, we can track it. This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before. We call the elements of this trace altmetrics.
Altmetrics expand our view of what impact looks like, but also of what’s making the impact. This matters because expressions of scholarship are becoming more diverse. Articles are increasingly joined by:
J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Altmetrics: A manifesto, 26 October 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto
What does altmetrics look like? This is one view. (snap shot, ScienceDirect September 15, 2015) In this case "Observation of a new particle in the search for the standard model higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC" Physics Letters B 716 (1) 2012.
10 tips for using altmetrics in your cv and grant applications blog post by Celia Carver
Altmetrics FAQ ECS Digital Library (Society for sold-state and electrochemical science and technology) Tips on how to use altmetrics and how to improve your score.
Altmetrics in action: applications for researchers Fran Davies
While Altmetrics are becoming better understood and accepted, as with all scholarship, there is debate and disagreement.
One of the strongest opponents to altmetrics is Jeffery Beal of Beal's list. His issues are discussed in "Article-Level Metrics: An Ill-Conceived and Meretricious Idea." Impactstory's blog provides another view of those same issues in "What Jeffrey Beall gets wrong about altmetrics."
Altmetrics are likely here to stay--in the old print models of dissemination citations and journal impact factors were all scholars had to measure impact. While those traditional measures still have value they only measure citations and neglect all the other proxies for impact that are part of the research environment.
The following publishers are among those including altmetrics in their journals:
Effective September 29, 2015 Web Of Science includes usage counts. These metrics count 'intentional' actions--clicking through to full text or exporting to a citation manager or a format (e.g. cvs) that can be used with a citation manager. There are two counts:
Usage counts are not yet available at the author level.
This highly cited article would still be missing part of the story without altmetrics. What are included in altmetrics? The number out social media sites keeps expanding but in general altmetric feeds from:
