(20 May 2013) John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has launched a trial of Altmetric, a service that tracks and measures the impact of scholarly articles and datasets on both traditional and social media. The six month trial will run on a number of subscription and open access journals published by Wiley including Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, BJU International, Brain and Behavior, Methods in Ecology and Evolution and EMBO Molecular Medicine.
As part of the trial Altmetric will track social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, blogs, newspapers, magazines and online reference managers like Mendeley and CiteULike for mentions of scholarly articles published in the journals included in the trial. Altmetric will create and display a score for each article measuring the quality and quantity of attention that the particular article has received. The Altmetric score is based on three main factors: the number of individuals mentioning a paper, where the mentions occurred and how often the author of each mention talks about the article.
Article level metrics are emerging as important tools to quantify how individual articles are shared, used and discussed. These are being used in conjunction with more traditional metrics focused on long-term impact of a collection of articles found in a journal based on the number of citations.
“We’re pleased to be working with Altmetric,” said Rachel Burley, Vice President and Director, Open Access, Wiley. “The pilot will allow us to understand the value of alternative metrics to our authors and users and how those metrics are used.”
“Our journal publishes articles that are among the most highly accessed and cited in scientific research,” said Dr. Peter Gregory, Editor in Chief, Advanced Materials. “We want to provide readers with access to our research through all channels, with authors enjoying a prominent social media presence and excellent coverage in the global news and science media. It will be interesting to review the Altmetric data as it becomes available to better quantify journal article impact.”
Altmetric is a system that tracks the attention that scholarly articles and datasets receive online. It does this by pulling in data from three main sources; Social media like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and blogs, Traditional media and Online reference managers like Mendeley and CiteULike.
Altmetric cleans up and normalizes the data from these sources then makes it available for analysis. A key difference between Altmetric and other social media monitoring services is that Altmetric will disambiguate links to articles: it knows that even though some tweets might link to a PubMed abstract, newspapers to the publisher’s site and blog posts to a dx.doi.org link they’re all talking about the same paper. More here: http://altmetric.uservoice.com/
