What are Altmetrics?

Learn more about altmetrics from Andy Tattersall, Information Specialist at The University of Sheffield.

Hi, this is Andy Tattersall from The School of Health and Related Research at The University of Sheffield and I’m going to talk about Altmetrics in under 60 seconds.

Altmetrics first appeared in 2010 and are in essence alternative indicators of scholarly interest. They provide additional information in addition to traditional metrics such as citations and impact factor scores. They can measure traditional and social media attention, Wikipedia and policy document citations, downloads, views and how many times an article has been saved to a reference management tool such as Mendeley.

Not only can they measure traditional outputs such as journal articles but other artefacts such as datasets, posters and figures, anything that has a trackable ID such as a Pubmed ID, ISBN or DOI. There are several platforms out there that track or make sense of such attention so its worth looking at Altmetric.com, Growkudos, ImpactStory, Figshare, Dimensions and Plum Analytics.

To find out more, go to internationalbunch.com/resources