Skip to Main Content

Measuring and Broadening Your Research Impact

Of Interest: Altmetrics

The NISO Altmetrics Data Quality Code of Conduct - found above - describes the data collection and dissemination practices and methods for the following entities that harvest altmetric data: Mendeley; Altmetric; Twitter; Facebook; and, Wikipedia.

Introduction

While metrics like the h-index, citation counts, and the impact factor of journals demonstrate the influence of research in the academic realm, altmetrics can provide a means of showing the more immediate impact of work in social media.

Altmetrics include social media activity (tweets, likes, blog mentions, etc.), coverage in media outlets, and inclusion in policy documents or scholarly commentary. It can also be inclusion of an article in collections such as Mendely, Connotea or CiteULike. Altmetrics are considered in tenure and promotion decisions variably; check with your department for guidance on best practices.

Alternative metric data can be collated into four buckets*: 
- Social Activity (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google+ etc.)
- Scholarly Activity (e.g., Mendeley and Citeulike).
- Scholarly Commentary (blogs, Wikipedia, F1000 Prime, Pubpeer, etc.)
- Mass media

* as defined by Snowball Metrics

Social media has affected the lifecycle of scholarly outputs

                       

 Images from the University of British Columbia, UBC Library, "Building Your Academic Profile"

Some of the major publishers are beginning to offer altmetrics on their sites. In March, IEEE began to include article level metrics (PDF downloads and HTML views) and are soon adding vendor Altmetric badge visualizations.

Nature is another example of a publication that offers article level metrics, including Altmetric badge visualizations.

PLoS One has always included altmetric data, which include "Discussed" - on twitter, facebook or comments, among other metrics. See the full coverage here

Major Commercial Altmetric Providers

As mentioned above, the company Altmetric aggregates altmetric data and supplied it to various entities. They offer services directly to researchers, as well.

Impact Story will let you do a free trial, which could be useful if you were interested in collecting altmetric data to be submitted with a portfolio, for example.

And finally, Plum Analytics. "The [founders] could see that over the last two decades how people use research and communicate about research had completely changed. People often learn about and find research though their social media network. They access research through a myriad of sites including open access repositories. Long gone are the days where the only access to research was through a printed journal, yet, the statistics to capture the impact of research had not changed to reflect this. The research community still relies on Citation Counts and Journal Impact Factor to determine the most important and valued research even though those are lagging indicators in a world where timeliness is important. In early 2012, Mike and Andrea founded Plum™ Analytics with the vision of bringing modern ways of measuring research impact to individuals and organizations that use and analyze research. In 2014, Plum Analytics became a part of EBSCO Information Services."