What are altmetrics?

Altmetrics are a broad category of metrics about scholarly products - journal articles, books, chapters, presentations, datasets, code, and more - that are created when people interact with those products in an online environment, such as social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Altmetrics also include less formal mentions of scholarly products in the news media, on scholarly blogs, in policy documents, and on Wikipedia pages. The term altmetric was coined in the altmetrics manifesto (J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon, 2010) as a response to the limitations of citation metrics.

Altmetric is a product of the company Digital Science, while altmetrics is the broader term used to describe this category of metrics.

Want to see an example of the types of mentions captured? Check out the Altmetric Details Page for the article "The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship."

Why use altmetrics?

One benefit of altmetrics is that they are created and available in real-time. It can take months to years for citations to appear, depending on the pace and volume of publishing in your field. This delay can be a source of stress, especially for pre-tenure faculty, who have only a few short years to establish a research program, publish, and begin to gather evidence of impact.

Another benefit is that altmetrics have the potential to indicate impact beyond the realm of scholarly publishing. Mentions in sources like Wikipedia and news outlets can speak to public interest and engagement with your work. In some cases, altmetrics can be used as evidence of community impact or impact upon policy or legislation. Rather than letting the metrics drive your understanding of the impact of your work, we encourage users to start with the types of impact that they want to see.

How to use altmetrics

Altmetrics are typically used as a complement to citation metrics. They can be good indicators, not direct measures, of interest, attention, discussion, and usage. When combined with citation metrics and qualitative evidence, altmetrics can provide compelling evidence to demonstrate scholarly impact, as well as other types of impact (https://becker.wustl.edu/impact-assessment/model).

Key ideas:

• Citation metrics and altmetrics are indicators derived from interactions with scholarly products. These metrics are NOT direct measures of quality or impact.
• No metric is a substitute for evaluation by peers.
• Citation metrics have generally been developed and studied for describing and comparing nations, institutions, and programs. The data used to generate citation metrics and altmetrics are biased and limited because they are created by limited and biased systems - research, higher education, and publishing. Evaluators should be mindful of such limitations and biases when using metrics in evaluating individual researchers.

There are two main providers of altmetrics - Altmetric, a division of Digital Science, and PlumX, a division of Elsevier. As an individual, you can access some data from Altmetric for free on an Altmetric Details Page, which exists for all products they index. This information is sometimes embedded in publisher and institutional repository websites. Some PlumX altmetrics are embedded in Scopus, which you can access from the University Library database list. While the coverage of both Altmetric and PlumX is broad, it is not complete. IUPUI does not currently subscribe to Altmetric or PlumX.