Altmetrics

In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional metrics proposed as an alternative to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, 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. They are related to Webometrics, which had similar goals but evolved before the social web. Altmetrics did not originally cover citation counts. It also covers other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, downloads, or mentions in social media and news media.

Projects such as ImpactStory, and various companies, including Altmetric.com, and Plum Analytics are calculating altmetrics. Several publishers have started providing such information to readers, including BioMed Central, Public Library of Science (PLOS),Frontiers,Nature Publishing Group, and Elsevier.

Starting in March 2009, the Public Library of Science also introduced article-level metrics for all articles. Funders have started showing interest in alternative metrics, including the UK Medical Research Council. Altmetrics have been used in applications for promotion review by researchers. Furthermore, several universities, including the University of Pittsburgh are experimenting with altmetrics at an institute level.

However, it is also observed that an article needs little attention to jump to the upper quartile of ranked papers, suggesting that not enough sources of altmetrics are currently available to give a balanced picture of impact for the majority of papers.

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