Research Guides: Alternative Citation Metrics: Home

Acknowledgements

This guide was created using guides from Impact Story, University of Maryland, Iowa State University and North Carolina State University.

Types of Altmetrics

Some example altmetrics that your different research outputs might receive include:

Articles, Preprints, Working papers, Technical reports

Citations: Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed Central, and Google Scholar citations; citations in policy documents
Bookmarks: scholarly bookmarks on Mendeley & CiteULike; bookmarks by the public on Delicious & Pinboard; Twitter favorites
Discussion: Twitter mentions, Facebook wall posts; newspaper articles, videos, and podcasts; mentions on scholarly blog networks like ResearchBlogging
Shares: Twitter mentions, Facebook shares
Views: Pageview & download statistics from the journal website or repository where you've archived your paper

Books & book chapters

Citations: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar citations; Google Book citations
WorldCat holdings: the number of libraries worldwide that have purchased your book
Views: Pageview & download statistics from your publisher's website or the repository where you've archived your book/chapter.
Ratings: Amazon.com and Goodreads ratings

Data

Citations: Data Citation Index citations
Views: views and downloads from Figshare, Zenodo, Dryad, ICPSR, or other subject or institutional repositories
Reuse: GitHub forks

Software

Citations: Google Scholar citations
Downloads: download statistics from GitHub, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, or other institutional or subject repository
Adaptations: GitHub forks, Bitbucket clones
Collaborators: GitHub collaborators
Discussion: GitHub gists, mentions on Twitter, Figshare comments

Posters

Views: views and downloads on Figshare, Zenodo, or other institutional or subject repository

Slides

Views, likes, comments and downloads on Slideshare, Speakerdeck, and Figshare
Shares: Slideshare embeds on other websites; mentions on Twitter, Facebook shares, LinkedIn shares

Videos

Views: Youtube, Vimeo, and Figshare views
Likes/Dislikes: Youtube likes and dislikes; Vimeo likes; comments, shares

Limitations of Traditional Impact Measures

Professor Pádraig Cunningham of UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics outlines h-index calculation and why it is not a usable metric for early career researchers

What are Alternative Metrics or Altmetrics?

Altmetrics are statistics sourced from the social Web that can be used to help you understand the many ways that your work has had an impact with other scholars, the public, policy makers, practitioners, and more.

They are useful supplementary measures of impact, best used in tandem with traditional measures like citation counts. Together, the two types of metrics can illustrate the full impact of your work.

How they work

Altmetrics uses this ability to track interaction with online items as a way of measuring research impact and reach.

Altmetrics can answer questions such as:

How many times was it downloaded?
How many times was it shared? (on Facebook, on Twitter, etc.)
Was it covered by any news agencies?
Are other researchers commenting on it?
Which countries are looking at my research?

Altmetrics vs. Altmetric

Confusingly there is a company named Altmetric which provides and collects altmetrics for journals and articles. Many large publishers have contracts with this company so you will see their trademark Altmetric donut (see right) in many places. There are also Almetric badges which you can find on any deposited journal article with a DOI.