Altmetrics are alternative metrics to traditional citations that provide a more comprehensive view of impact by tracking how research outputs are shared and discussed online. Altmetrics can capture mentions and interactions on social media, news sites, blogs, and other online platforms. They offer a fast and open way to measure impact beyond citations alone. While still experimental, altmetrics provide real-time indicators of how research is engaging practitioners and the public, and may serve as early predictors of future citations. A variety of tools now exist for tracking altmetrics and discovering the online impact of scholarly works.

1. #altmetrics 101
and why you need to know about them
michelle dalton
university of limerick

2. impact > citations

3. why
you
need
to
know
about
them

4. the theory

5. ―Altmetrics are fast, using public APIs to
gather data in days or weeks. They‘re
open – not just the data, but the scripts
and algorithms that collect and interpret
it. Altmetrics look beyond counting and
emphasize semantic content like
usernames, timestamps, and tags‖
altmetrics, a manifesto
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

6. downloads, shares, tweets, likes,
views, bookmarks, scopus
citations, comments, reviews,
wikipedia articles, blog posts,
news stories, saves, +1s, google
scholar citations, favourites, clicks,
stars, mentions …

7. … of journal articles, book
chapters, data-sets, videos, blog
posts, slide decks, software,
conference papers, websites …

8. in practice

9. within twelve days
of publicationarticle published 3 apr 2013
screenshot 15 apr 2013

10. but zero citations

11. real-time indicators of impact
captures ‗practitioner‘ impact of those who
may never publish
evidence of public engagement
a leading indicator for future citations?
measuring impact

12. discover trending topics and papers
identify potential collaborators
track the impact and reach of your article
across different channels
research tools

13. the tools

14. works for any
paper with a doi
http://www.altmetric.com/bookmarklet.php

15. impactstory.orgnot just citations

16. impactstory.org

17. impactstory.orgpubmed central
& scopus

18. what people are talking about now
plos.org

19. plumanalytics.com

20. altmetric explorer
altmetric.com

21. www.papercritic.com

22. ―In the next five years, I believe that it will
become routine to track — and to value —
citations to an online lab notebook,
contributions to a software library, bookmarks to
data sets from content-sharing sites such as
Pinterest and Delicious. In other words, to value
a wider range of metrics that suggest a
research product has made a difference‖
heather piwowar
Nature 493, 159 (10 January 2013) doi:10.1038/493159a