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Measuring Your Research Impact

Definition

Alternative metrics, or altmetrics, are tools that measure the current use of your publications. These tools provide a more current measure of research impact than citations, which may take months or years after you publish. Altmetrics might measure usage, captures, mentions, discussions, social media, and/or citations.

What can altmetrics tell you ?

Here are some ways altmetrics measure the impact of your research:

  • how many times has it been downloaded or viewed
  • number of posts on social media
  • how the news media is covering it
  • how your peers are discussing it

What do altmetrics look like?

The Altmetric donut and its associated Attention Score are fairly recognizable. Usage is divided into different colored categories, ranging from policy documents and news to social media and patents. All the attention is added up to create an Attention Score, which is shown in the middle of the donut.

The bookmarklet (linked above) is a quick way to find information related to documents of interest. Here's what that might look like in practice:

Zhou, D., Patankar, S., Lydon-Staley, D. M., Zurn, P., Gerlach, M., & Bassett, D. S. (2024). Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership. Science Advances, 10(43), eadn3268. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/sciadv.adn3268

  • Altmetrics page

PlumX is an altmetrics instrument with five categories of usage. These are highlighted in a PlumX "plum print" (looks sort of like a tree?) comprising citations, usage (for example, downloads), social media, captures (like bookmarked sites), and mentions (such as blog posts). Here's what that might look like in practice:

Hascher, T., & Waber, J. (2021). Teacher well-being: A systematic review of the research literature from the year 2000–2019. Educational research review, 34, 100411. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X21000348

Kalisch, B. J., & Lee, K. H. (2010). The impact of teamwork on missed nursing care. Nursing outlook, 58(5), 233-241. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0029655410002666

Many venues will include simple usage statistics, even just a count of how many times a document has been downloaded. Here are a few examples of what that might look like in practice:

Cummings, D., & Kenton, F. J. (2004). Eleven case studies of failures in geotechnical engineering, engineering geology, and geophysics: how they could have been avoided. https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/5icchge/session07/1/

Barni, M., Bartolini, F., & Cappellini, V. (2000). Image processing for virtual restoration of artworks. IEEE multimedia, 7(2), 34-37. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/848424

Galbraith, Q., Butterfield, A. C., & Cardon, C. (2023). Judging journals: How impact factor and other metrics differ across disciplines. College & Research Libraries, 84(6), 888. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/26097