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Altmetrics

Altmetrics: what they are, tools to gather them and how to increase your altmetric scores.

About Altmetric

  • Altmetric gathers article level metrics for journal articles, and provides altmetric data for publishers, institutions and researchers.
  • Altmetric widgets may be embedded into databases, e-journals or institutional repositories (such as Elements).
  • You can also use the Altmetric bookmarklet to view metrics for any online article with a DOI.
  • Altmetric gathers metrics for articles from four main types of sources:
  1. Policy documents
  2. Mainstream media
  3. Social media
  4. Online reference manager and publisher download count data

Example:

Lustig, R. H., Schmidt, L. A., & Brindis, C. D. (2012). Public health: The toxic truth about sugar. Nature, 482(7383), 27-29.

Altmetric Explorer for Institutions

  • The University of Melbourne has a subscription to Altmetric Explorer.
  • We recommend creating an Altmetric Explorer account so that you can access additional functionality, such as the ability to save searches, set up Shareable Reports, set up email reports, and more.

i) If you are on campus, and using a computer with a University of Melbourne IP address, you can create an account via the Sign in link within the database.

ii) If you are off campus you can access the database via the link above and either sign in with your existing Altmetric Explorer account, or create an account using the unique invite link available here(University of Melbourne login required).  August 2018: Already have an account but are having problems logging in? Use the unique invite link above to register again and regain access.

  • You can use Altmetric Explorer to explore social media mentions for:

All publications with authors affiliated with the University of Melbourne, or

Specific authors, or

Faculties, departments, or schools, or

Subject areas.

  • Note that Altmetric Explorer imports information on University of Melbourne authors and their publications from Elements. Therefore it is important to keep your Elements profile up-to-date.

Make sure your research is tracked

By following these 3 easy steps you can get your research to be tracked in Altmetric Explorer.

  1. Deposit your research and other outputs:
    • Before your research and other outputs can be tracked by Altmetrics Explorer My Institution they must be deposited in University of Melbourne’s Minerva Access or Elements.
    • If your research output has no identifier (eg a DOI), you need to deposit it into Minerva Access or Figshare. This generates a handle which acts like a DOI, for a direct link to your research output.
      NOTE: Check to see if your research output is already mentioned by switching to the Full Altmetric database.
       
  2. Mention specific research outputs:
    • When you tweet, blog, Facebook, etc, aim to mention specific articles and other research outputs - it’s the research output itself that is tracked by Altmetric Explorer.
       
  3. Include a direct link:
    • To be tracked by Altmetric Explorer it is best to include a direct link to the research output using a unique identifier (this can be adapted using a link shortener like bitly or Twitter’s own).
    • These identifiers include any form of DOI, Minerva handle, PubMed ID, ISBN, or link to the publisher site

Databases and eJournals with embedded information from Altmetric

Many databases and e-journals now have Altmetric information embedded in the articles' pages.

Look out for an Altmetric box, Am score button, Article metrics link, or similar, and click through to view the full article-level metrics.

If a database or e-journal does not have embedded altmetric information, you can use the Altmetric bookmarklet.

For some examples, see the databases and e-journals below:

Altmetric it! Use the Altmetric Bookmarklet

Use the Altmetric bookmarklet for a quick and easy way to view article level metrics for any online article that has a DOI:

  1. Drag the bookmarklet into the bookmarks bar in your browser.
  2. View any paper in your browser.
  3. Click the bookmarklet to view altmetrics for the article.

The Altmetric bookmarklet only:

  • Works for articles from PubMed, arXiv or pages containing a DOI,
  • Supports publishers who embed Google Scholar friendly citation metadata on their pages,
  • Collects twitter mentions for articles published since July 2011.

For more information see:

What are Altmetrics?