Altmetrics

This article is about alternative scholarly impact metrics. Not to be confused with article-level metrics.
Part of a series on
Citation metrics
The original logotype from the Altmetrics Manifesto.[1]

In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics[2] proposed as an alternative[3] or complement[4] to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index.[5] The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010,[1] as a generalization of article level metrics,[6] and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.

Altmetrics use public APIs across platforms to gather data with open scripts and algorithms. Altmetrics did not originally cover citation counts,[7] but calculate scholar impact based on diverse online research output, such as social media, online news media, online reference managers and so on.[8][9] It demonstrates both the impact and the detailed composition of the impact.[1] Altmetrics could be applied to research filter,[1] promotion and tenure dossiers, grant applications[10][11] and for ranking newly-published articles in academic search engines.[12]

Overtime, the diversity of sources mentioning, citing, or archiving articles has gone down. This happened because services ceased to exist, like Connotea, or because changes in API availability. For example, PlumX removed Twitter metrics in August 2023.[13]

  1. ^ a b c d Priem, Jason; Taraborelli, Dario; Groth, Paul; Neylon, Cameron (September 28, 2011). "Altmetrics: A manifesto (v 1.01)". Altmetrics.
  2. ^ "PLOS Collections". Public Library of Science (PLOS). 3 November 2021. Altmetrics is the study and use of non-traditional scholarly impact measures that are based on activity in web-based environments
  3. ^ "The "alt" does indeed stand for "alternative"" Jason Priem, leading author in the Altmetrics Manifesto -- see comment 592
  4. ^ Haustein, Stefanie; Peters, Isabella; Sugimoto, Cassidy R.; Thelwall, Mike; Larivière, Vincent (2014-04-01). "Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 65 (4): 656–669. arXiv:1308.1838. doi:10.1002/asi.23101. ISSN 2330-1643. S2CID 11113356.
  5. ^ Chavda, Janica; Patel, Anika (30 December 2015). "Measuring research impact: bibliometrics, social media, altmetrics, and the BJGP". British Journal of General Practice. 66 (642): e59–e61. doi:10.3399/bjgp16X683353. PMC 4684037. PMID 26719483.
  6. ^ Binfield, Peter (9 November 2009). "Article-Level Metrics at PLoS - what are they, and why should you care?" (Video). University of California, Berkeley.
  7. ^ Bartling, Sönke; Friesike, Sascha (2014). Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet Is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing. Cham: Springer International Publishing. p. 181. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8. ISBN 978-3-31-900026-8. OCLC 906269135. Altmetrics and article-level metrics are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are important differences: article-level metrics also include citations and usage data; ...
  8. ^ Mcfedries, Paul (August 2012). "Measuring the impact of altmetrics [Technically Speaking]". IEEE Spectrum. 49 (8): 28. doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2012.6247557. ISSN 0018-9235.
  9. ^ Galligan, Finbar; Dyas-Correia, Sharon (March 2013). "Altmetrics: Rethinking the Way We Measure". Serials Review. 39 (1): 56–61. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2013.01.003.
  10. ^ Moher, David; Naudet, Florian; Cristea, Ioana A.; Miedema, Frank; Ioannidis, John P. A.; Goodman, Steven N. (2018-03-29). "Assessing scientists for hiring, promotion, and tenure". PLOS Biology. 16 (3): e2004089. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2004089. ISSN 1545-7885. PMC 5892914. PMID 29596415.
  11. ^ Rajiv, Nariani (2017-03-24). "Supplementing Traditional Ways of Measuring Scholarly Impact: The Altmetrics Way". hdl:10315/33652. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference :6 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ "Plum Analytics Metrics Audit Log - Plum Analytics". plumanalytics.com. Retrieved 30 September 2023.