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Promoting your Research for Maximum Impact: Altmetrics

Introduction

Altmetrics stands for "alternative metrics and lets us measure and monitor the reach and impact of scholarship and research through online interactions. These numbers provide a more complete picture of the reach and impact of research and scholarship; one that goes beyond citations in peer-reviewed publications. Altmetrics works with your online presence to constantly accumulate data at a much faster speed compared to traditional metrics.

Altmetrics are meant to compliment, not totally replace, traditional measures such as citation counts and author H-Index.

Benefits

Altmetrics can answer questions such as:

  • Who is reading my work? (on Mendeley, bookmarking sites, etc.)
  • Was it covered by any news agencies?
  • How many times was it shared? (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
  • Which countries are looking at my research?

Considerations​​​​​​

  • Altmetrics are time sensitive, older research might not have any metrics but this does not mean it is not being discussed
  • Altmetrics are not normalised and should be used to tell a broader story about your research

Example

This is the Altmetric page for the sample article referred to. Altmetric has calculated an overall score for this research based upon the amount of interaction across various platforms including news outlets, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. Each platform is assigned a weighted score which when combined provides the overall attention score. This article has been mentioned on Twitter over 8,000 times and has appeared in over 33 news articles.

It is possible to look at each platform individually in order to see who has tweeted or which news outlets have picked up the research.

 

Accessing Altmetric Data

Almetric data is available in several ways. Here is more information on where you can find and access this data