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.
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:On PsychiatryOnline journal articles, the overall score for each article is displayed to the right of the article title.