Altmetrics
In recent years, a new type of metric called “altmetrics” has emerged. Altmetrics, also known as alternative metrics or article-level metrics, complements traditional citation counts and the h-Index.
Altmetrics demonstrates what kind of attention an article has received in non-traditional sources such as social media, online news sources, blogs, social policy and other non-academic sources.
Almetrics can be used to demonstrate your broader impact as a researcher and to provide evidence of social impact and engagement.
Altmetrics provides you with real time information on the attention being given to your scholarly content. It tracks attention to a broad range research outputs. It can also track the use of your research within policy.
Altmetrics information is now displayed in many subscription databases such as Scopus, Science Direct and EBSCOhost databases. An example follows of PlumX metrics for an individual paper.
Image: Screen showing the PlumX metrics for an individual paper. Used the terms and conditions of the vendor license.
Altmetrics are also available from open access resources like the RMIT Research Repository. The RMIT Research Repository displays altmetrics from Altmetric.com. For example below is a paper from the Research Repository which receives an altmetrics score of 174 mentions.
Activity
Go to the Research Repository and look up either yourself (if you have published) or another RMIT academic you know who has published.
Take a note of how many altmetric mentions a particular paper has. Use the almetrics link to find out the details of where the article has been mentioned or discussed.
