Measure Your Research Impact: Altmetrics

Impactstory is a free web-based tool developed in part by a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina.  Impactstory provides metrics from a variety of sources and normalizes those metrics based on comparison sets.  Impactstory provides metrics for journal articles, data sets, slides and other research products.

Here are some of the metrics that Impactstory collects:

• Citations in Scopus
• PDF downloads, or HTML views, from PLoS
• Full text views and PDF downloads on PubMed Central
• Readers who have added an article to their Mendeley library
• Tweets

Add citations or other products to your profile by:

• Importing citations and more from GoogleScholar, ORCID, Figshare, GitHub, Slideshare and other sources
• Entering a PMID, digital object identifier (DOI) or URL
   

"The study and use of non-traditional scholarly impact measures that are based on activity in web-based environments."
Source: https://collections.plos.org/altmetrics

Examples of altmetrics include:

• Bookmarks or Saves to online reference managers such as Mendeley and Zotero
• Mentions in social network sites such as Twitter or Facebook
• Discussions in blogs and media
• Number of views in sites such as Slideshare or YouTube
• Comments/annotations from readers in platforms such as PubMed Commons

"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." Source:  https://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

Two services, Altmetric and Impactstory, that aggregate these types of metrics are described below.

Altmetric offers a free bookmarklet that allows you to view article-level metrics for the articles that you read online. To get started, drag and drop the Altmetric bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar in your web browser.  Works for Chrome, Firefox and Safari.  Due to some limitations, the bookmarklet may not work for every article. 

• Altmetric Data Sources: Four main categories: Policy documents, mainstream media, social media, online reference manager and publisher download counts
• Altmetric Score: This number is a measure of the quality and quantity of attention that an article has received.  The colors surrounding the number reflect the mix of sources where the article has been mentioned.
• The Altmetric Top 100: What Academic Research Caught the Public Imagination in 2019?