The rapid development of social media and the mass media is having an impact on scientometrics. Research material is increasingly cited in blogs, personal Facebook profiles and tweets rather than in academic sources. Information about such use of the work comes more quickly and measures public interest rather than academic. These kinds of «unconventional mentions» were named altmetrics.
Altmetrics can be classified according to the following parameters:
- By the number of downloads and views;
- Based on the number of citations (excluding traditional bibliometric indicators);
- By the saved in bookmarks;
- Based on the number of discussions, comments, recommendations, etc.
Detailed analytics about altmetrics are provided by Almetric.com and PlumAnalytics.
Analytics through the Altmetric website
Altmetric.com can be used to collect information on mentions and analyse it from such sources:
- Policy documents. Use of the work materials in normative acts all over the world.
- Mass Media. More than 4,000 of main communication tools are analysed in order to study mentions of scientific papers within them.
- Bibliographic managers. The platform provides detailed information on the number of additions to the library using Mendeley. Information on the saved can be filtered by state or subject area.
- Publons. Post-publication analytics of research materials review is also undertaken.
- Wikipedia. Monitoring the free encyclopaedia in 12 language versions.
- Patents. The information is provided regarding economic impact based on citations in 9 international patent offices.
- Educational projects. Analysis of the use of material for science programmes and curricula.
- Blogs. The analytics of the number of mentions in over 9,000 academic and non-academic blogs.
- Dimensions. More academic indicators and citations in CrossRef, PubMed Central, OpenCitations, or directly from full-texts provided by content publishers are used. In addition to references in scientific articles, the service can track citation information in books, preprints, conference proceedings, patents, grants, and clinical trials.
- Research highlights. Analysis of mentions according to Faculty Opinions.
- Social media. Monitoring of mentions in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Sina Weibo, Pinterest.
- Multimedia and other online platforms. Information about mentions on YouTube, Reddit, Q&A (stack overflow).
A detailed list can be used to track the number and type of mentions for each individual study, as well as in which country the article has been mentioned the most and by whom (members of the public, scholars or communicators, which includes science bloggers, journalists, etc.). For each type of mention there is a separate tab where user can see the text of the material where the reference is submitted.
Data analysis with PlumAnalytics
The service has similar working principles, but a slightly different methodology for evaluating the data. It analyses mentions from about 50 indicators, from resources such as CrossRef, Scopus, GitHub, bit.ly, Vimeo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Figshare and many others. The indicators can be divided into 5 groups:
- Citations – the category includes citations from both traditional citation indices and alternative ones. The latter are more reflective of societal impact: patent citations, citations in official documents, etc.
- Usage – a measure of research views. These can be downloads, clicks, video playback, etc.
- Captures – shows how many interested audiences tend to return to the research findings in the future (bookmarked, saved, number of readers)
- Mentions – measuring the number of references to an article in mass media and blogs (blog posts, comments, reviews, links to Wikipedia, news resources).
- Social media – This category includes tweets, Facebook likes, reposts, etc.
The use of altmetrics is now becoming more common in assessing the impact of scientific research. It is worth mentioning that the use of this type of indicators has both supporters and critics. It is up to each researcher to decide whether to consider alternative metrics or to concentrate on classical, bibliometric indicators.
If you would like to receive a professional advice on improving the main scientometric indicators of your scientific paper and its publication in the international databases Scopus and Web of Science databases, please contact the experts of the «Scientific Publications» company. Fill in the form on the website and you will be contacted within the working day.
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Earlier our website released a material «What are altmetrics and what resources are used for their analysis?»
