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Research Impact

Article Altmetrics

Which altmetrics are available at the article level?

There are several metrics in the article level that are grouped into four categories. The categories are the following:

  1. Usage metrics: this group of metrics reflects the options users have within online tools to interact directly with individual scholarly contributions
  2. Capture metrics: this group of metrics reflects the options users have within online spaces for planning with longer term interactions with individual scholarly contributions, "capturing" them for use or reuse.
  3. Mentions: this group of metrics point to the discussion of a scholarly work within and across social media.
  4. Social media metrics: this group of metrics points to the power of social media to capture and spread information to a larger public.
  5. Scores & rankings: this group of metrics showcases the unique analysis that altmetric tools provide within their platforms.

Check the tabbed box below to view all types of altmetrics offered in the above categories.

This group of altmetrics includes the following measures:

  • Clicks & Views: Many scholarly websites and online publications use Google Analytics to find out how many unique users have visited a URL or clicked a particular link within a site.

  • Downloads: Many websites with downloadable scholarly content will tell users how many times people have downloaded an item from the cite.

  • Sales/Holdings: An extremely useful metric, especially for monographs that reflects how many people or institutions have purchased a work.

This group of altmetrics includes the following measures:

  • Bookmarks: Bookmark counts from social bookmarking sites like Diigo  that allow users to save and and organize the URLs of sites to a single personalized location counts as a metric. 

  • Forks: This metric refers to the impact of a work in inspiring new "branches" or similar projects. This is a common metric in the world of software development for instance the online code repository GitHub allows users to help users track the number of forks that their project generates.

  • Favorites: This metric refers to the number of time that users within an online tool or community score, rank or tag a work as being one of their favorites. 

  • Saves/Readers: This metric is gathered from academic peer networks that support communities aroung readership such as Mendeley , or the Social Science Research Network . It counts interactions within a tool's closed network of users.

This group of altmetrics includes the following measures:

  • Blog Posts: This metric refers to the collection of posts appearing in research blogs or blog networks or blogs associated with scholarly journals that refer back to an original work. 

  • Comments: This metric refers to the collection of comments that show how users interpret, react, and incorporate a work. 

  • Reviews: This metric refers to the review counts an individual contribution receives within a specific site, tool, or online social spaces for example Amazon or Goodreads .

  • Attributions: This metric refers to the collection of attributions arising from non-journal works and could include the use of part of a written work in a presentation, or on a blog, or in a guide, Images, datasets, original music, quotes could be attributed. 

This group of altmetrics includes the following measures:

  • Likes: This metric refers to the number of times people indicated that they enjoyed or found a work valuable. Likes are found in many social media sites like Facebook, YouTube etc. 

  • Shares & Tweets: This metric refers to the times a link to a work has appeared on Facebook or Twitter. 

This group of altmetrics includes the following measures:

  • Altmetric's Altmetric Score: This metric refers to the attention a scholarly article has received. The score takes into account three factors: 
    • volume - the overall extend to which people are mentioning an article,
    • sources - types of places where the article is mentioned,
    • authors - who is mentioning the article, to what extend these authors may be biases or engaged with scholarship.

  • Impactstory's Altmetrics Percentiles: This metric refers to the assigned percentiles to a contribution within the frame of a single altmetric. Impactstory , an open source web-based tool, is the provider of these percentiles. 

Which tools provide altmetrics at the article level?

There are several tools providing atlmetrics at the article level.

Check the tabbed box below to find out which tools are available.

Altmetric Explorer provides us with a free librarians account. We can browse and report on all attention data for every piece of scholarly content it includes.

You can ask us to generate altmetrics reports for the articles / journals you are interested in. To do so, email us at [email protected]. Once you email us the list of articles / journals you need, we can access the "Altmetric Details Page" of the articles / journals and email you back the results. 

An image showing the journal's altmetrics in Altmetric Explorer

The Altmetric Bookmarklet is a free browser tool for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that lets you easily find out how much attention papers have received online. 

To install the Bookmarklet:

a. Visit Bookmarklet for Researchers  and register. 

b. Drag the “Altmetric It” button to your bookmarks bar. 

An image showing the "Altmetric it" browser tool added in the favorites bar.

Once you install it, you can click the Bookmarklet’s “Altmetric It!” button everytime you want to find the altmetrics of an article. The altmetrics  data for that paper will appear on the right side of the page. The Bookmarklet shows you the Altmetric donut , which is colour-coded according to which sources have mentioned the article.

Inside the donut,  the Altmetric Attention Score  for the paper. The metrics are displayed below the donut: here, you can see how many times a paper has been mentioned in various sources , such as social media , mainstream news , and blogs . You can even see the number of readers who have saved the paper in their online reference managers.

An image showing the altmetrics donut.

If you click for more details, you’ll get direct access to the Altmetric Details Page, on which you can find out exactly what has been said about the article.

PlumX DOI look up is an openly available widget that provides altmetrics in the article level. To use it type in your browser address bar: https://plu.mx/a/?doi= 

An image showing the Plum X DOI widget

 

Add a DOI to the end.

An image showing the doi added to the Plumx widget

 

Once you add the DOI, the widget will locate the altmetrics of the article. 

An image showing the Plum X widget altmetrics

PlumX Metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with individual pieces of research output (articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and many more) in the online environment. They categorize metrics into 5 separate categories: Citations, Usage, Captures, Mentions, and Social Media. You may find this tool integrated in some library databases. 

Plum X altmetrics integrated in Science Direct database

To access the altmetrics of a particular article in Science Direct click the title of an article. Altmetrics appear at the left of the screen. Click view details to see the full analysis.

An image showing Plum altmetrics and View details in Science Direct

Once you click View Details, you will get a screen with all the available Plum altmetrics as well as the most recent Tweets.

An image showing Plum X altmetrics in Science Direct

 Dimensions is a partially free tool that offers the almetrics for the articles it includes.

Click the Altmetric button to view the details page of the altmetrics of the specific article.

An image showing the details page with altmetrics of an article in Dimensions