New perspectives on article-level metrics: developing ways to assess research uptake and impact online

Altmetrics were born from a desire to see and measure research impact differently. Complementing traditional citation analysis, altmetrics are intended to reflect more broad views of research impact by taking into account the use of digital scholarly communication tools. Aggregating online attention...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jean Liu, Euan Adie
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Ubiquity Press 2013-07-01
Series:Insights: The UKSG Journal
Online Access:http://insights.uksg.org/articles/73
Description
Summary:Altmetrics were born from a desire to see and measure research impact differently. Complementing traditional citation analysis, altmetrics are intended to reflect more broad views of research impact by taking into account the use of digital scholarly communication tools. Aggregating online attention paid to individual scholarly articles and data sets is the approach taken by Altmetric LLP, an altmetrics tool provider. Potential uses for article-level metrics collected by Altmetric include: 1) the assessment of an article's impact within a particular community, 2) the assessment of the overall impact of a body of scholarly work, and 3) the characterization of entire author and reader communities that engage with particular articles online. Although attention metrics are still being refined, qualitative altmetrics data are beginning to illustrate the rich new world of scholarly communication, and are emerging as ways to highlight the immediate societal impacts of research.
ISSN:2048-7754