Alternative metrics

Taking into account the fact that traditional citation metrics may not be appropriate for evaluating researchers in all subject areas or in all cases, a newer group of metrics, alternative metrics (or “altmetrics”), have been proposed. Alternative metrics include things such as tweets on Twitter, and even download or view counts in citation management sites such as Mendeley.

Altmetric has created a comprehensive What Are Altmetrics guide, that offers a more in-depth discussion of the topic than is provided on this page.

Different services have been established to help researchers determine these altmetric values, including:

Altmetric.com: provides a bookmarklet that can be saved to your web browser and clicked on to provide aggregate altmetric values for academic content on the web. Subscriptions to their products are also available to institutions.

Plum Analytics: A subscription based service aimed at institutions, with a variety of products that gather five different types of metrics and can provide assistance with finding funding opportunities in the United States, benchmarking and institutional repository analytics.

ImpactStory: Geared towards individuals, this subscription based service allows you to create a profile and keep track of profile metrics for the research content you share.