Research Impact

Some researchers look to other metrics to help measure their impact, either because they are dissatisfied with more traditional measures like the impact factor, or because they'd like to use them to supplement more traditional measures to help them craft a more compelling narrative about the impact of their work. Altmetrics and article-level metrics (ALM) are some newer metrics that help researchers contextualize the impact of their work.

Advocates for the use of altmetrics and ALM argue that their strengths include:

• openness (unlike metrics like the impact factor, altmetrics are compiled using openly available data)
• quicker to demonstrate than metrics such as citation counts
• can serve as an indicator of indirect influence, in the absence of a citation
• broader, more diverse sources considered - looks beyond academia

Over the years, several critiques of altmetrics and ALM have emerged. Many of these themes are similar to the objections raised against more traditional metrics such as the impact factor. Here are some commonly encountered themes:

• difficult to trust because of their reliance on 3rd party data and a lack of transparency
• easy to game (just like the journal impact factor is)
• measures "attention," not "influence"
• says nothing of the quality of one's work (again, like the journal impact factor)
• lack of correlation between attention on social media and citation counts
• citation counts are not accurate proxies for influence

There are several tools and databases that you can use to track your publications' altmetrics and ALM.

Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities

Journal information in Cabell's features the Altmetric donut. Click on it for a breakdown of where people are talking about and/or citing the journal:

Altmetrics for the journal Food Policy, as presented in Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities.

EBSCOhost Databases and ScienceDirect

Some articles in EBSCOhost Databases and in ScienceDirect feature PlumX Metrics:

Click on the PlumX icon for further information:

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For more information, click on "View details" to see a breakdown for the article, similar to the one above for "What is it like to be a bat?"

ScholarWorks

Click on "My Account," then log into your ScholarWorks account. Then, click on "Author Dashboard" to see where your readers are located, download statistics, and to share your dashboard with others.

In addition to EBSCOhost Databases, ScienceDirect, and ScholarWorks, researchers can create accounts with Impactstory, Mendeley, Kudos, and download the Altmetric bookmarklet and/or API to capture their altmetrics and article-level metrics. Researchers that have published with the Public Library of Science (PLoS) can create an ALM Report for a set of PLoS articles, view, summarize, and create visualizations of the data; researchers whose works have been peer reviewed post-publication or open peer review can highlight these comments as featured in F1000, MLA Commons, PubPeer, Peerage of Science, or others. Researchers who have uploaded works to various online archives and e-/pre-print servers like arXiv, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), SocArXiv, MLA Commons, PhilPapers, and others can also access various types of usage data like download statistics, etc.