Abstract
Altmetrics were born from a desire to see and measure research impact differently. Complementing traditional citation analysis, altmetrics are intended to reflect more broad views of research impact by taking into account the use of digital scholarly communication tools. Aggregating online attention paid to individual scholarly articles and data sets is the approach taken by Altmetric LLP, an altmetrics tool provider. Potential uses for article-level metrics collected by Altmetric include: 1) the assessment of an article's impact within a particular community, 2) the assessment of the overall impact of a body of scholarly work, and 3) the characterization of entire author and reader communities that engage with particular articles online. Although attention metrics are still being refined, qualitative altmetrics data are beginning to illustrate the rich new world of scholarly communication, and are emerging as ways to highlight the immediate societal impacts of research.
Highlights
From the development of diverse, innovative tools to a growing body of case studies illustrating the flexibility of article-level metrics, there are strong signs that altmetrics have the potential to fill in the missing pieces of the impact puzzle
Altmetrics measures are not standardized and have not been systematically validated; there has been no clear consensus on which data sources are most important to measure; and technical limitations currently prevent the tracking of certain sources, such as multimedia files[4]
Aligned with altmetrics is the idea that the research impact of a particular piece of work might be more fairly assessed with the use of new ‘article-level metrics’, rather than sole use of the journal impact factor and traditional citation-based analyses[5]
Summary
Since citations are slow to accumulate, rapid indicators of online research uptake such as basic access statistics (download counts and page views) and social media metrics (number of tweets, number of Facebook wall posts, etc.) are becoming more informative. Due in part to the rapid adoption of various new internet-based modalities for disseminating research, there has been a strong impetus to account for online attention and assess impact more immediately and broadly, in conjunction with traditional citation-based analyses. The concept of altmetrics, measures of online scholarly impact, was born from a desire to assess research impact differently
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