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Research Impact at Purdue

A research guide on the ways to best practices for managing your online academic identity

Altmetrics Definition

Altmetrics, or alternative metrics is a catch all term which refers to the statistical analysis of alternative forms of capture of research articles and research products such as presentations and conference proceedings. In other words, alt-metrics is all of the other ways of capturing and measuring how people use research output. Examples are twitter mentions, download counts, and comments on your work. Such metrics are imprecise, but they do capture the ways in which your and other scholars work is being used. Altmetricians look at work on the article level rather than at the journal or research field level, thus their work tells stories about an individual researcher rather than a body of researchers like bibliometrics does.

 

Uses of Altmetrics

Uses of Altmetrics

  1. Discovering emerging trends
  2. Researching what other scholars are researching
  3. Engaging with your readership
  4. Developing your online presence
  5. Fleshing out bibliographies and literature reviews
  6. Discovering how your work is being used by others
  7. Using in-depth metrics to understand the ways in which your work flows through social networks

Types of Altmetrics Explained

Altmetrics appear at the article, poster, and conference proceedings level. Therefore the following breakdown is broken down by type

Article

  1. Citations from citation databases
  2. Bookmark from places such as Mendeley
  3. Discussion pieces are artifacts from peer review websites, newspaper articles, and mentions on scholarly blogs
  4. Shares on social media

Posters

  1. Downloads on sites such as Figshare
  2. Discussion pieces such as comments
  3. Bookmarks on sites such as Menedeley

Books

  1. Citations captured in citation databases
  2. Views are the number of time your work has been seen on a website
  3. ratings are taken from amazon and goodreads reviews / ratings out of five stars
  4. Worldcat holdings are the measure of how many libraries in the world have purchased your book

Videos

  1. Views on YouTube or Vimeo and like sites
  2. likes, the number of people who liked the artifact on sites like YouTube and Vimeo
  3. Discussion is the amount of comments on a video, and the range of conversations being had about it in the comments section
  4. Shares, a rarer metric but one you will run into which is the number of times an item has been shared on social media

Plum Analytics

plum analytics logo

Plum Analytics is a suite of products which focuses on altmetrics. It draws its the majority of its data from Amazon Books, Facebook, Twitter, Git-hub, Mendeley, and Scopus.

Plum Analytics uses a number of common alt-metrics such as usage, captures, and mentions.

  • usage is things such as clicks, downloads, and views
  • captures is bookmarks, favorites, and reader numbers
  • mentions are things like blog posts, comments on X, and media coverage