Altmetrics tools for individual researchers:
Altmetrics tools for institutions:
Institutions can choose to embed altmetrics in their institutional repositories or researcher profiles. Two commonly used services are Altmetric.com and Plum Analytics. Both of these tools index a wide range of altmetrics.
Traditionally, scholarly impact has been measured through citations, specifically citations from journal articles to journal articles. However, since citations to individual articles tend to be slow to accumulate, as a proxy, researchers, administrators, and funders have relied upon the aggregate impact of the journal in which an article appeared. This is measured by the Journal Impact Factor, now produced by Thomson Reuters.
Wikipedia defines the Journal Impact Factor as "a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal... In any given year, the impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years."
Unfortunately, the Journal Impact Factor is not an appropriate tool for assessing the impact of individual articles. Why?
For these reasons, a movement against the inappropriate use of Journal Impact Factors is gaining momentum. In 2013 the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was released. It offered this general recommendation: "Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions."
Article-Level Metrics
Article-Level Metrics are an attempt to measure impact at the article level. They can include traditional measures of impact such as citation counts as well as newer metrics like the number of times an article was downloaded. Article-level metrics can also include altmetrics (see below).
While article-level metrics are by definition limited to scholarly articles, some of the tools discussed in this guide can help you identify citations to other individual research products, e.g. books or book chapters.
A growing number of journals and publishing platforms are making article-level metrics available. For example, article-level metrics are provided for every article published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Metrics include total article views and downloads; citation data from SCOPUS, Web of Science, CrossRef, and Google Scholar; bookmarks in Mendeley; and mentions on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.
Other journals, including Nature, offer similar metrics from Altmetric.com, while journals published on the HighWire platform incorporate metrics from ImpactStory.
And Trinity University faculty who have archived their articles in our Digital Commons or SelectedWorks receive an email each month with the number of times each article has been downloaded.
Altmetrics measure the impact not only of journal articles but a diverse array of online scholarly outputs such as books, book chapters, data sets, computer code, presentation slides, posters, blog posts, digital humanities projects, and websites.
In addition to scholarly impact, altmetrics also measure impact beyond the academy, for example through Wikipedia citations, media mentions, Delicious saves, tweets, and facebook posts. This ability to measure public impact is valuable to authors, institutions, and research funders in helping them gauge the real-world impact of their scholarship and the scholarship they support.
Altmetrics are also more immediate than traditional measures of impact like citations that take time to accrue. Because altmetrics measure impact beyond the journal article, measure more types of impact, and are available right away, they can free scholars to experiment with and receive credit for new types of scholarly products.