Evaluating Research Impact Using Altmetrics

Altmetric, ImpactStory, and Plum Analytics are some of the main aggregators of altmetric information and they provide a variety of services for researchers, publishers as well as institutions.

Publishers work with altmetric aggregators in order to provide altmetric data for scholarly articles. As a result, authors can check the impact of their online scholarly research by accessing their article in the journal and reviewing the aggregated altmetrics. Authors have another option - they can set up a personal account with Altmetric, ImpactStory or Plum Analytics to view the impact of their collective online published research. The altmetric information is updated regularly - often daily. Generally, altmetric data is displayed two ways for quick reference - visually (e.g Altmetric donut and Plum Analytics Plum Print) and in summary format.

Get Started:

• Free altmetric bookmarklet available to view the altmetrics for any journal article published with a DOI.
• Institutional subscription required to access all tools and services (e.g. creating an individual researcher profile).
• You can set up your ORCID profile to work in Altmetric.
• View the researcher case studies.

Get Started:                

• Use Twitter to join for free and keep track of news items, blogs, tweets etc. about your published research.
• You can use your ORCID in ImpactStory.

Get Started:

• Institutional subscription required to access all tools and services (e.g. creating an individual researcher profile).
• You can integrate your ORCID with Plum Analytics.
• View the PlumX Metrics overview video. 
• Plum Analytics is owned by Elsevier.

Get Started:

• Create a free Google Scholar Citations profile by navigating to the "Help" button at the bottom right of the home page, followed by the "About Scholar Button," followed by the "Profiles" tab. A Google Scholar profile can help you to track article level metrics (e.g. number of times your article was cited on the web with the link to see which researchers are citing you, chart highlighting the number of times your articles were cited in a given year and the h-index). Note: If you do not have a Google account, you will be asked to create one.
• The researcher has the option to keep their profile private or open it to the public.

Get Started:

• Create a free Mendeley account. Mendeley is both a citation management program as well as a peer network for scholarly researchers.
• To participate in the peer network create an individual profile.​
• Mendeley altmetric data - such as the number of times an article is added to the Mendeley library - is captured and shared with other altmetric data providers (e.g. Plum Analytics and PLOS ONE).
• Mendely is owned by Elsevier.

Public Library of Science (PLOS)

Get Started:

• PLOS is a leading open access publisher who supports Open Science.
• Currently PLOS publishes twelve science and medicine journals including PLOS One, PLOS Medicine, and PLOS Global Public Health.
• PLOS was an early adopter of article level metrics and altmetric data was tracked for each article starting in 2009.

Get Started:

• Create a free ResearchGate account. ResearchGate is a peer network for scholarly researchers mainly in the disciplines of science and medicine.
• A ResearchGate user profile includes a stats tab to track, for example, the number of times individual articles have been read and which researchers have read your article.

Get Started:

• Create a free Social Science Research Network (SSRN) account. SSRN is a peer network for scholarly researchers.
• Altmetric data is collected for each article, for example, number of downloads, and number of times the paper was cited.
• SSRN is owned by Elsevier.