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Altmetrics

Eveything you need to get you started with altmetrics.

Who uses altmetrics? 

Publishers

Some publishers provide altmetrics on their websites to authors and the public. PLOS has been a leader in providing altmetrics. Each article they publish has a "Metrics" section which provides a wealth of information. Click the image below to see an example.

 Repositories

Many repositories such as the Iowa State Digital Repository provide authors with a dashboard (example below) that show statistics about their works in the repository. These statistics are separate from the statistics gathered by publishers, so if you are archiving your work in a repository, make sure you take these into account! 

DR Author Dashboard

 Websites

If you created a website for your research project, you can collect statistics about who is using it. Google Analytics is a free platform that keeps track of this information and provides reports that include which state/country your users are from and which pages/items are being clicked and used.

If you are using a service like Wordpress, they may already be collecting this information for you!

 Social Media

Another place you can gather altmetrics is through online social interactions. Not all platforms are open, but Twitter for example, has an open API which lets other websites connect to it and harvest statistics. 

Retweets, likes, and shares are a way to track the interest level of a research project or article. Comments on blogs, reviews, and articles are another place you can look.

Bookmarking and Citation Management Tools

Another source of altmetrics are social bookmarking and reference management tools. There's been some research that shows that the number of times an article is "saved" by users may correlate to later citations (Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact).

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Megan O'Donnell
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