Potential Advantages:
Potential Drawbacks:
Note: Similar to other metrics, altmetrics does not reveal the quality of a work; that is up to the individual scholar to assess. Quantitative measures are only part of a scholar's impact story.
Altmetrics is the use of alternative, or nontraditional, measurements to better understand the extent of a work's scholarly impact. According to the altmetrics: a manifesto, "Altmetrics expand our view of what impact looks like, but also of what’s making the impact. This matters because expressions of scholarship are becoming more diverse."
Altmetrics serve as a complement to traditional metrics (e.g., citation counts) by incorporating statistics regarding usage, capture, and mentions of scholarly works in online environments. Examples of alternative metrics include number of clicks, views, and downloads, as well as social media mentions and news coverage.
Librarians can help you navigate the world of scholarly impact! Please don't hesitate to reach out to your subject librarian.
Depending on the product (e.g., Altmetric.com, PlumX), altmetrics are gathered using unique identifiers. These tend to be DOIs (Altmetric.com), but are sometimes ISBNs and URLs (PlumX). Altmetric.com provides free tools to researchers with basic capabilities, while costs are associated with enhanced features. PlumX has costs associated with all features.
Digital Commons@UMaine Institutional Repository
DigitalCommons@UMaine provides access to the scholarly, educational, and creative works of the University of Maine community. Metrics available in the Digital Commons include download statistics and an Altmetric.com score (for items with DOIs). See more about Altmetric.com in the box below. Digital Commons also includes PlumX metrics (which covers many social media applications, but not X, formerly named Twitter), another alternative metric company.
IEEE Explore
Click on the abstract or title to see the altmetric score on the bottom right of the page.
Altmetric.com tracks a range of online sources that capture the social life of a researcher's scholarly activity. Altmetric.com is a commercial product that offers a free bookmarklet and is embedded in a variety of library databases.
The Metrics Toolkit was launched in January 2018, from "a group of information professionals who are passionate about using the best possible evidence for research evaluation."
The Metrics Toolkit is "a resource built to help researchers and evaluators navigate the ever-changing research metrics landscape.The Metrics Toolkit includes 27 expert-written, time-saving summaries for the most popular research metrics including the Journal Impact Factor and Altmetric Attention Score."
Also included is an app that can recommend discipline-specific metrics based on your specific use cases.
ResearchGate is a social networking platform where scholars can share research outputs, ask and answer questions, and identify potential collaborators. The contributions made to ResearchGate (e.g., uploaded publications and/or data, questions you ask and answer), the interactions people have with your work on the site, and the reputation of the people interacting with your work make up your RG score. Additional information on the RG Score can be found here, and on their h-index here.
Impactstory is an open-source, web-based tool you can download from Github that helps scientists explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products—from traditional ones like journal articles, to emerging products like blog posts, datasets, and software. Alternatively, you can sign up for an account and use the Impactstory platform to create an altmetric researcher profile.
