alternative metrics

Researching the Value of the Impact Factor

Impact factors were released this week. The impact factor has long been a measure of a journal’s research output, but in recent years there have many attempts to find alternative ways to expand how research is assessed. This excerpt from Diversity, value and limitations of the journal impact factor and alternative metrics in Rheumatology International explores some of the many other measurements available today.  Over the past decades, there have been many attempts to overcome limitations of the popular JIF and to propose new citation metrics bearing more comprehensive information on citable sources and their scientific value. The latter has become … Read more…

Service Spotlight: Article Level Metrics

Article-level metrics provide an alternative option to the well-known impact factor when measuring the impact of a journal’s research. Each journal article’s SpringerLink page includes Altmetrics data that explores how the article is being cited, used and discussed on the social web. An overview: Article-level metrics allow authors and editors the ability to see a wide range of metrics that cover article coverage across social media and the internet. How are these metrics calculated? We partner with Altmetrics, who track multiple sources to help better monitor and report the attention research receives. What sources are metrics collected from? When available, … Read more…

Beyond the sciences – altmetrics for other disciplines

At Altmetric we’ve always tracked the online attention for items with a scholarly identifier, no matter what subject they might be. Despite this, the majority of the attention we’ve seen to this published research so far tends to be for articles or data relating to public health or scientific breakthroughs. Why is this? Partly, we suspect, it’s because these are matters of broad public interest, and the primary outputs of researchers working in those disciplines tend to be academic articles, which then get then published in a journal, and, if deemed high profile enough, promoted further by the publisher as well as the author(s).

Beyond the article – metrics for other research outputs

In the previous blog post in this series, we briefly talked about how researchers can reap the benefits of making all their research outputs available online. The principle behind this post is to explore the questions around “tracking other outputs” in a little more detail.

Best practices for successful research dissemination & discovery

So far in this blog series, we’ve talked about the insights you can get from Altmetric data, and how researchers can use the data in CVs and grant applications. The aim of this post is to talk about best practices for sharing your research online, and how to use different online platforms for networking and discovery purposes.

Altmetrics in action: researcher case studies

Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking about what altmetrics are, what Altmetric.com data can show you, and some ideas for how researchers might use it. In this post you’ll find some real-life use cases featuring researchers who have gone ahead and done just that.

How can journal editors use Altmetric data?

In our previous post in this guest blog series, we introduced the Altmetric score and details pages, and briefly covered the insights that can be gained from looking at Altmetric data. The aim of this post is to discuss how journal editors can use the data to view, monitor and report on the online attention for the research they publish.

10 tips for using altmetrics in your CV and grant applications

In the last few years altmetrics have been adopted by many institutions, publishers, funders and researchers as a way of tracking and monitoring the online attention, reach, and influence of published work. Increasingly these data are also being used to identify and report on the broader impacts of research to funders and other key stakeholders. In our previous post in this series we gave an overview of what the Altmetric data for each article on SpringerLink can provide, now we’d like to delve into the use cases a little more.

In this post we’ll cover some of the main things to consider when looking to use altmetrics data in your CV and for funding grant applications – including best practice, some tips to get you started, and potential pitfalls to avoid.

An Introduction to Altmetric Data – What Can You See?

Altmetrics have been developed over the last few years as a way of monitoring the online conversations around scholarly research. The data can be used alongside traditional indicators of impact, such as the Impact Factor, to see how an article has been received, shared and communicated beyond the the academic sphere. The aim of this introductory blog post is to provide some context around the data and the sources Altmetric (a London-based provider of altmetrics data) tracks, and to explain some of the insights that can be gained by looking at the data.

Interview with Euan Adie, Founder of Altmetric

As scholarly communication and research evaluation processes evolve, new measures and metrics have developed to help better monitor and report on the online activity that surrounds research outputs. Altmetrics, as these new indicators are known, offer a collated record of this online activity for readers and authors to explore and analyze.

Through August and September we will publish a series of posts authored by some of the team at Altmetric, a data science company who provide such attention data to authors, publishers, institutions and funders. The posts will discuss, amongst other topics, using altmetrics within your C.V.s and grant applications, and how journal editors can make use of the tools.

To kick-start the beginning of this special blog series, we decided to go to, well—the source—of Altmetric directly, by asking founder Euan Adie a few questions.