Altmetrics is a general term for alternative measures to traditional research output measures. Traditional output measures include the h-index and other means of counting citations to scholarly articles. Altmetrics provides measures of social media and news outlet posts and mentions of scholarly output. See the slide show below for more information.
Altmetric badgesAltmetric is one company providing alternative measures of research output. Almetric badges are found beside articles on various publisher's pages. Each color represents a source. For example, this article was found 39 times in social media and the dark blue represents the numer of times it was Tweeted or re-Tweeted. Publishers who display the Altmetric badge include:
Here are some examples on the publishers' pages:
The Altmetric bookmarklet lets the researcher immediately see Altmetric data on a paper found on the web. Download the bookmarklet to your browser and give this paper a try.
The National Institutes of Health use the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) to measure the impact of a portfolio of papers. The tool, called iCite, is used to access a dashboard of bibliometrics for papers. The researchers uploads the PubMed IDs to display the RCR.
Neil Hall has published a commentary in Genome Biology in which he suggests the Kardashian Index as a measure of both Twitter popularity and citations.
