Alternative metrics, or altmetrics as they are more commonly known, have received a lot of attention recently with news items describing their rise as an “Alternative” metric to measure research impact. However, not everyone has been convinced and you can read an interesting counter-argument here.
You can see for yourself by checking out one of your papers via Research Online or the Pubs DB to see if it’s been picked up on social media or the news. Added features are a geographical breakdown of tweets as well Tweeter demographics (scientist, journalist, Joe Bloggs). You can also monitor via email updates when your article is shared. Lastly there is also an Altmetric score which measures the quality and quantity of online attention that an article has received.
You can follow the uses of Altmetrics via the Impactstory blog and see what Altmetric are doing in this video.
