Altmetrics As A Tool: Tracking and Showcasing the Broader Impacts of Your Research

What are altmetrics?

Altmetrics are non-traditional metrics that allow you to track the qualitative attention data associated with your research. Whether it has been published in a journal, as a white paper or report, Altmetric (an altmetrics provider) have tracked attention to over five million research outputs from sources including policy documents, Wikipedia as well as mainstream and social channels. The data is collated to create a colourful visualisation that provides an at-a-glance summary of the volume and type of attention your publication has received.

How altmetrics can help you

Altmetric tracks thousands of mentions of scholarly work each day, but what does this mean for researchers? Especially when there’s already an established proxy for the impact of your research. Altmetrics were developed to be a complementary metric to the traditional Impact Factor (IF), and aim to present a more complete picture of the online research and engagement for individual research outputs.

In comparison to traditional metrics, which mainly reflect attention from within the scholarly sphere and are slow to accumulate, altmetrics can help authors understand where and why their work is being discussed amongst a wider audience, and provide much more immediate feedback. Altmetrics offer more insight into the dissemination of a piece of published research and show the tangible influence it has had on your field of study as well as larger society. These kinds of insights are great for:

• Adding more weight to funding applications
• Helping potential recruiters get a better idea of the importance of your research
• Putting your work in context alongside that of your peers.

This has probably left you thinking, ‘this sounds great but where should I start?’’ Altmetric offer some easy to use, free tools for researchers to help you get started:

• The Bookmarklet

The Altmetric Bookmarklet is a tool for your internet browser to show the attention the paper you’re reading is receiving. It can be installed onto Chrome, Firefox or Safari and sits on your toolbar and shows you the online shares and mentions on the article in just one click. The Bookmarklet is simple to install – all you need to do is head to our website and drag the ‘Altmetric it!’ button into your toolbar.

• The Badges

Easily embed this colourful visualisation into your website or personal profile to provide an at-a-glance summary of all of the online attention for an individual piece of research. Click through on any badge to visit the Altmetric details page for that article which shows a collated record of all of the mentions across the web. (Top tip: make sure you email info@altmetric.com to let us know the domain of your website, so we can be sure to unlock the full details page so you can see all of the mentions!)

Our badges are used by dozens of researchers to give visitors to their websites an up-to-date showcase of the influence each of their papers has had. Here’s a great example of how our badges can be used from, Marine Ecologist, James Grecian’s website:

You may have also seen the Altmetric Badges appear on publisher’s websites to show the online attention surrounding an article, alongside other insights such as downloads and citations. Here’s an example from Nature:

The Altmetric Badge for each article can often be found alongside the abstract pages on publisher websites, and if clicked will take you to the Altmetric details page.

Details page:

Instructions of how to embed the badges can be found on our website here.

For more information on how you can use Altmetric tools to show the broader impact of your research visit the Altmetric website here and follow us on Twitter to keep up to date on our latest news and developments.

Josh Clark joined Altmetric in February 2016 as Marketing Executive taking on responsibilities for such as social media, the Altmetric Ambassadors program and marketing planning. Josh has previously worked in a variety of sales and marketing roles for a number of academic publishers. He has a degree in Publishing from Oxford Brookes University and completed his diploma in professional marketing in 2015.