Altmetrics for Researchers

"Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship." according to altmetrics.org.  

Altmetrics stands for Alternative Metrics. The term first appeared in a tweet as a hashtag (#altmetrics) in 2010 about article level metrics. Since then many articles have been written about altmetrics and several tools have been developed to track altmetrics.

Why should we care about altmetrics?

Altmetrics are new metrics used to measure the impact of web-native scholarship fast and in various ways. They

• Serve as alternative to traditional metrics (not replacing traditional metrics but rather complementary) to  measure the scholarly and social impact of research outputs. In this regard, they really should be referred to as Alt-Com-Metrics.

• Track the immediate impact of publications and other scholarly artifacts.

• Can be used as early indicators of article impact.

• Can track how publications perform after publishing

• Monitor research influence for funding purpose

• Can be useful for promotion or tenure evaluation

2018 - AROSIM 2018 (Workshop on Altmetrics for Research Outputs Measurement and Scholarly Information Management) -                                           http://www.altmetrics.ntuchess.com/AROSIM2018/ (AROSM 2018 aims to address a range of opportunities, emerging tools and methods,               along with other discussion topics in the fields of altmetrics, non-traditional metrics, and related areas. This workshop aims to gain a multi-             disciplinary perspective on this new and cutting-edge research area.)

2017 - Elsevier acquired Plum Analytics (February 2017)

2017 - 4:AM – 4th Altmetrics Conference in Toronto in 2017 with altmetrics17

2016 - 3:AM – 3rd Altmetrics Conference in Bucharest in 2016 with altmetrics16

2015 - 2:AM – 2nd Altmetrics Conference in Amsterdam, 2015 with altmetrics15

2014 - EBSCO acquired Plum Analytics, Jan 2014

2014 - Plum Analytics partners with ORCID, Sept 12, 2014

2014 - The 1st Altmetrics Conference (London), Sept 25-26, 2014 

2013 - In June 2013, NISO awarded a grant for a two-phase initiative on Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Project .

2013 - San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) initiated by ASCB and launched in May 2013.

2012 - 2012 - OASPA Conference (included a session on article metrics with talks by BioMed Central, PLoS, and Plum Analytics)

2012 - Budapest Open Access Declaration

2011 - Plum Analytics founded by entrepreneurs Andrea Michalek and Mike Buschman in late 2011.

2011 - Altmetrics11 Workshop (An ACM Web Science Conference workshop, and it is now annual. June 2011).

2011 - Altmetric.com founded

2011 - Total-Impact project, later relaunched as Impact Story.

2010 - Birth of the term Altmetrics & Altmetrics Manifesto v.1 (http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/). Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P. & Neylon, C.               (2010) “Altmetrics: A Manifesto”, http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/.

2009 - PLoS Article Level Metrics (ALM) Project (2009).

2008 - Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) started collecting views and tweets.

Last Updated: May 5, 2020