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Alternative Metrics

Alternative metrics (altmetrics) Use the social web—such as download counts, pageviews, mentions in news reports, social media, and blogs—to analyze the societal attention your work receives. They provide a complementary way to assess the impact of your scholarship beyond academia.

Altmetrics:

  • include social media activity, coverage in media outlets, and inclusion in policy documents or scholarly commentary 
  • are data tracked from discussions happening online
  • can be gathered from any online forum where research is being discussed, including social media, research blogs, public policy documents, news articles and more
  • measure the impact of scholarly and social use of research in a way that can be applicable to a wide variety of fields
  • measure how research is having an impact outside of the academy
  • offer a greater sense of immediacy
  • compliment established methods such as citation counts and impact factor but don't replace them

Advantages/Disadvantages

Altmetrics are generated more quickly than traditional metrics, such as the impact factor, which permits the impact of your publications to be assessed much sooner. They provide broader and deeper insights into the impact of scholarly articles, researchers, universities, and other such things that lie outside the scope of traditional metrics. They can reveal how an article or piece of research affects diverse groups such as practitioners, educators and the general public

However, it can be difficult to use altmetrics comparatively between different disciplines, or even in the same discipline. Some disciplines are more active than others online, and some may favor particular social media tools that are used less often in other areas of scholarship. Fluctuations in the popularity of social media tools can reduce the reliability of altmetrics scores.

Contact

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Richard Hayman
he/him
Contact:
Email: rhayman@mtroyal.ca
Phone: 403.440.8518
Office: EL4441K