Altmetric
Altmetric helps authors see how much attention their work is receiving online. It is a view of where your work is being discussed, mentioned and shared. Altmetric receives data from:
- Social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.),
- Traditional media (mainstream and specialist news websites),
- Blogs,
- Online reference managers like Mendeley and CiteULik.
Altmerics, as an evaluation method supplementing and not replacing bibliometrics, may in the future contribute to a more precise measurement of the scope of scientific communication in the environment of the Internet of the future, in an open model of scientific communication.
Adventages
- data are automatically collected and updated,
- studying the impact of scientific output among different categories of users, not necessarily related to the scientific community,
- monitoring various forms of scientific activity such as blog posts, recommendations, comments,
- the ability for researchers to track real-time interest in their output,
- availability of altmetrics data on various services like Twitter, Facebook, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.eu, Slideshare, Wikipedia, Zotero, Mendeley, among others.
Limitations
- lack of standardization of data acquisition and archiving methods,
- lack of ability to control and compare the impact of indicators from different sources,
- large number of mentions in social media does not indicate that the article is of high quality,
- susceptibility to manipulation, e.g. auto-replacement, citing on blogs of own publications and recommending them in rating services, creating circles of mutual adoration, initiating false discussion,
- publications that have not been provided with a digital object identifier (originally published in print and not digitized) are not included.