Skip to Main Content

Bibliometrics & Citation Analysis: Altmetrics &
Social Media

What are Altmetrics?

Altmetrics are alternative metrics used to measure the impact of research. The term is often used to mean impact based on online activity, mined or gathered from online tools and social media. Altmetrics can be used as an alternative, or in addition, to traditional metrics such as citation counts and impact factors. Examples include: 
  • tweets, mentions, shares or links
  • downloads, clicks or views
  • saves, bookmarks, favourites, likes,
  • reviews, comments, ratings, or recommendations, 
  • readers, subscribers, watchers, or followers.
  • Metrics for alternative research outputs, for example citations to datasets.
  • Other alternative ways of measuring research impact.

Improve Your Altmetrics

To improve your altmetric scores you need to have an online presence and share information about your work and your research outputs online.

There are a number of ways to do this such as:

  • Blog  about your articles or work and ask others to write blog posts about your work.
  • Tweet Become active on Twitter and tweet links to your articles and other work.
  • Use social networks for researchers Create a profile and add your publication list to social networking sites for researchers, such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley and/or LinkedIn. See boxes on this page for further information about some of these websites.
  • Register for researcher IDs Register for an ORCID id and keep your list of publications up-to-date.
  • Make your research outputs available online Make all your research outputs including data, code, videos and presentations available online by using on content hosting tools such as figshare, YouTube, Vimeo, and/or SlideShare. Use a free service like Kudos to explain your research in easy to understand terms, and monitor your research impact.
  • Deposit your work in an institutional or subject repository Deposit your work in Ulster University's Pure institutional repository, and/or a subject-specific repository for example, arXiv.

Plum Analytics

Plum Analytics can be seen in action in Usearch, our discovery service for journal articles. It is also prominent in Scopus.The Plum Analytics logo gives the reader an indication of how popular an article is, highlighting the number of times it has been mentioned on social media, how many times it has been viewed/downloaded, 'captured' by referencing software and more. Find out more about Plum Analytics here.

Altmetric

 

 

You will sometimes see this 'altmetric donut' in databases. The information comes from Altmetric.com. Click on the donut for more information.

LinkedIn

ResearchGate

​