Alternative Metrics

Alternative metrics (altmetrics) attempt to record scholarly activity beyond traditional academic publishing and citation counts. From the online environment it gathers information from social media--blogs,bookmarks, links, twitter, facebook and other similar sources.  It also captures article postings on article hosting sites or citation management tools like Mendeley.

Supporters of alternative metrics propose that altmetrics helps measure the impact of an article in a way traditional metrics do not, especially in regard to the journal impact factor. Some suggest a combination of alternative and traditional metrics give the best view of an article's acceptance, importance and dissemination.

Alternative metrics concentrates on article level metrics (ALM)

Altmetrics: A manifesto
J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Altmetrics: A manifesto, 26 October 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto

The Source  A blog from Springer  Select the tag alternative metrics

Presentations of alternative metrics from Slideshare

Outputs of the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics Project

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The Indiana University Libraries subscribe to a number of databases from vendor who offer alternative Metrics
Some open source databases also include alternative metrics for the articles retrieved from a search
A few alternative metrics sources offer a bookmark app to reveal the alternative metrics for an article. Altmetric.com is one; you load it to your bookmark bar, and click on it while viewing an article. If it can the app will give you the alternative metrics __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Metrics Toolkit
We developed the Metrics Toolkit to help scholars and evaluators understand and use citations, web metrics, and altmetrics responsibly in the evaluation of research. The Metrics Toolkit provides evidence-based information about research metrics across disciplines, including how each metric is calculated, where you can find it, and how each should (and should not) be applied.  You’ll also find examples of how to use metrics in grant applications, CVs, and promotion dossiers."

News       Tweets       Facebook (likes, shares and pages)       Blogs       Databases       Reddits     ;   Wikipedia (entry and mentions)       RSS       Videos (video uploaders)       Weibo       Google+ posts, users       Views (abstract views and full text views, supporting data views, unique IP views, figure views)       Downloads       Readers (Mendeley; CiteULike)       Shares (Cite3ULike, Mendeley, Facebook, other social media)       Citations (Wordpress.com)       Bookmarked items       Posters       Presentations       Slides       Datasets       Code       Captures       Exports       Link-outs       News       Mass Media