Research Guides: Research impact metrics: Altmetrics

Alternative metrics

Altmetrics are indicators of online societal attention and engagement with research, for example:

Commentary on social media and coverage in news media
Engagement on researcher platforms
Citations in non-scholarly publications (reports, policy documents, Wikipedia)

Altmetrics are useful for helping build a picture of your real-world impact by:

discovering who is engaging with your research, for example on twitter
tracking real-time views and downloads of publications
covering diverse research outputs, for example data sets and software

Alternative Metrics Tools

Alternative Metrics Tools:

Plum Analytics (PlumX)
embedded in databases such as Scopus, ScienceDirect and EBSCOhost. PlumX Metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with individual pieces of research output (articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and many more) in the online environment. These metrics are divided into five categories (Citations, Usage, Captures, Mentions, and Social Media) to help make sense of the huge amounts of data involved and to enable analysis by comparing like with like.
Altmetric.com:
Available within UOB Libraries SearchAll, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Wiley, Cochrane Library, Altmetric is a provider and aggregator of altmetrics information. They provide a free tool that allows you to quickly find out the altmetrics details of a paper or research output - the only requirement is that the bookmarklet can only work on research outputs that have a valid Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
You can learn more about the bookmarklet here - https://www.altmetric.com/solutions/free-tools/bookmarklet/
Impactstory Profiles:
Researcher impact profiles, linked to your ORCiD, which highlight altmetrics and nontraditional scholarly products. Also includes achievements, which are a way of looking beyond the numbers to find stories that matter: stories the buzz your research is generating, the level of engagement with your work, your openness, and some lighthearted fun from time to time.
PLOS One:
The PLOS website provides alternative metrics for their open access articles e.g. the number of saves, citations, views and shares
MetricsToolkit:
Provides a glossary of different types of altmetrics, and gives advice about the appropriate use of each metric, and how to choose metrics based on the impact that one is measuring.