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Research, Scholarship, & Creative Activity (RSCA) Impact

What are Altmetrics?

​chat bubbles vectorAltmetrics are measures of research impact that measure the wider, societal impacts of scholarly works by tracking how they are discussed, shared, saved, read, and reused by scholars and the public. Altmetrics are sourced from many web platforms and medias: number of downloads, shares, and mentions in venues such as institutional repositories, government documents, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, blogs, etc), and web-based reference managers like Mendeley and Zotero.

They are useful supplementary measures of impact, best used in tandem with traditional measures like citation analysis. Combined, these metrics can illustrate the broad impact of your work.

Tool for Locating Altmetrics

PlumX Metrics* - Plum Analytics

*SJSU has a subscription to PlumX Metrics

Collects impact metrics in five categories: usage, captures, mentions, social media, and citations. Tracks data for research outputs including journal articles, books, videos, presentations, conference proceedings, datasets, source code, cases, and more. Access:

  1. Go to select databases - see below for databases with PlumX Metrics available

  2. Search in select databases for an article or author

  3. In the detailed record place, locate the PlumX icon that looks like a very colorful 5-pronged asterisk

  4. View the details to see what information is available

Altmetric*

*SJSU does NOT have a subscription to Altmetric, but some features are freely available

​Altmetric is a web-based platform that allows users to track, search, and measure the conversations about their research happening online. They offers a free bookmarklet or subscription portal that presents the “quantitative measure of the attention that a scholarly article has received… derived from 3 main factors”: volume of mentions; source of the mention; and, author of the mention.

​ImpactStory*

*Freely available resource; no subscription needed

Impactstory Profiles tracks buzz on Twitter, blogs, news outlets and more; it is a coarse measure of online interest around your work. Additionally, they track how people are interacting with your research online including the quality of the discussion, who is having it, and where. It is easy to create an account by joining for free with your Twitter account.

Databases with PlumX Metrics Available

Only select databases have PlumX Metrics available, including:

Below are a couple of multidisciplinary databses that may be helpful to get you started with PlumX Metrics.