Altmetric
Altmetric
Monitoring the impact of individual articles, not just journals
Researchers, funders and institutions are increasingly concerned about the impact of their work and returns on their investments.
The traditional methods of counting citations and downloads to measure impact misses much, not least the reception to published research amongst wider society. As a result, there has been a desire in the scholarly community to gain a better understanding of the reach and attention a paper receives beyond the academic sphere.
‘Altmetrics’, or alternative metrics, have evolved help answer those questions by tracking and collating mentions and shares of academic research papers and other outputs (such as datasets) across traditional and social media outlets, blogs, public policy documents, post-publication peer-review forums and online reference managers.
Altmetrics on American Psychiatric Association Journals
Altmetric LLP, who provide the data, collect article level metrics and the online conversations around research papers by tracking a selection of online indicators (both scholarly and non-scholarly) to give a measurement of digital impact and reach. ‘Mentions’ that contain links to any version of the same paper are picked up, and collated. The result is the Altmetric score.
The Altmetric data available on the journal articles allows you to:- See the attention that each article is receiving from non-traditional sources, including:
- mainstream and social media
- published policy documents
- online reference managers
- post-publication peer-review forums
- Explore the conversations surrounding the content
- Identify recent papers your peers think are interesting
The Altmetric Score
The score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a scholarly article has received. It is derived from 3 main factors:- Volume
The score for an article rises as more people mention it. - Sources
Each category of mention contributes a different base amount to the final score. - Authors
How often the author of each mention talks about scholarly articles influences the contribution of the mention.
On PsychiatryOnline journal articles, the overall score for each article is displayed to the right of the article title.