What are Altmetrics?

​Altmetrics are measures of research impact that measure the wider, societal impacts of scholarly works by tracking how they are discussed, shared, saved, read, and reused by scholars and the public. Altmetrics are sourced from many web platforms and medias: number of downloads, shares, and mentions in venues such as institutional repositories, government documents, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, blogs, etc), and web-based reference managers like Mendeley and Zotero.

They are useful supplementary measures of impact, best used in tandem with traditional measures like citation analysis. Combined, these metrics can illustrate the broad impact of your work.

Information Below Includes

• Tools for locating altmetrics

Tool for Locating Altmetrics

Altmetric

Seattle University does NOT have a subscription to Altmetric, but some features are freely available

​Altmetric is a web-based platform that allows users to track, search, and measure the conversations about their research happening online. They offers a free bookmarklet or subscription portal that presents the “quantitative measure of the attention that a scholarly article has received… derived from 3 main factors”: volume of mentions; source of the mention; and, author of the mention.

​ImpactStory

Freely available resource; no subscription needed

Impactstory Profiles tracks buzz on Twitter, blogs, news outlets and more; it is a coarse measure of online interest around your work. Additionally, they track how people are interacting with your research online including the quality of the discussion, who is having it, and where. It is easy to create an account by joining for free with your Twitter account.