Research Guides

Research Metrics

This is a guide to the various metrics used to measure research impact.

Overview

Altmetrics refers to alternative ways of assessing the impact of authors and publications, usually by including their contributions and mentions in social media (e.g., blogs, Twitter).

The tools described on this page are independent of existing databases, though some, like PLoS, are publisher-specific.

Altmetric Tools

ImpactStory

ImpactStory creates a personal altmetrics report, based on the citations you claim in your ImpactStory profile. This report is based on citations, bookmarks, downloads, tweets, and other mention of your citations. You can also create an embeddable widget of your impact report.

Altmetric.com

The Altmetric service (not to be confused with the general term "altmetrics") aims to give a full record of all of the original shares and mentions of an individual piece of scholarly content.

PLoS

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) provides metrics for every article published in a PLoS publication. These metrics include amount of times the article has been viewed, cited, downloaded, saved, or discussed through sites like Facebook and Twitter.