Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. They can include (but are not limited to) peer reviews on Faculty of 1000, citations on Wikipedia and in public policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream media coverage, bookmarks on reference managers like Mendeley, and mentions on social networks such as Twitter.
Sourced from the Web, altmetrics can tell you a lot about how often journal articles and other scholarly outputs like datasets are discussed and used around the world. For that reason, altmetrics have been incorporated into researchers’ websites, institutional repositories, journal websites, and more.
We can look at altmetrics with the same lens through which we view bibliometics - by distinguishing four different levels of impact.
Individual scholarly contribution again refers to how much impact a specific article, book, or work has on research as a whole. This is the most layered altmetric statistic due to the large number of data points we have for individual works.
At the journal level, measuring altmetrics has largely become venue-based, as we can see from the two examples below. As altmetrics does not have as well-known standards as bibliometrics at this time, many publishers have taken it on themselves to create altmetric systems for their own journals.
At the author level, altmetrics starts to paint a broader picture. We now have tools to measure author impact over time in an altmetric sense. The tools below are just the start of a trend that will continue to grow.
Some of the same tools we see in individual altmetric tracking, as well as in bibliometric tracking remain relevant in the area of Institutional Altmetrics.