A critical review on altmetrics: can we measure the social impact factor?

Abstract

Altmetrics measure the digital attention received by a research output. They allow us to gauge the immediate social impact of an article by taking real-time measurements of how it circulates in the Internet. While there are several companies offering attention scores, the most extensive are Altmetric.com (Altmetric Attention Score—AAS) and Plum X (Plum Print). As this is an emerging topic, many medical specialities have tried to establish if there is a relationship between an article’s altmetric data and the citations it subsequently receives. The results have varied depending on the research field. In radiology, the social network most used is Twitter and the subspeciality with the highest AAS is neuroimaging. This article will review the process involved from the start when an article is published through to finally obtaining its altmetric score. It will also address the relationship between altmetrics and more traditional approaches focusing on citations in radiology and will discuss the advantages and limitations of these new impact indicators.

How to use Twitter at a Scientific Conference

“…With the advent of alternative metrics (“altmetrics”) as a measure of scientific research impact, services to science communication, such as live-tweeting scientific conferences, may be recognized as a valuable contribution to education and the democratization of scientific information, perhaps being incorporated into portfolios for academic promotion and tenure ( 23 – 25 ). Until this practice becomes commonplace, it may be best if the organizers of scientific conferences implement live-tweeting as part of their communication strategies to provide maximum outreach while ensuring that unpaid volunteers from academia are not overworked or taken advantage of.…”

From traditional Bibliometrics to Altmetrics: Socialising the research metrics

“…[ 4 ] These platforms include general social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube; scholarly social networks such as SlideShare, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and online reference managers; bookmarking sites such as Zotero and Mendeley; scientific blogs and general blogs; open access repositories; Faculty of 1000 (F1000); collaborative encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia; and social news websites such as Reddit. [ 5 ] Companies such as Altmetric.com, PlumX, Lagotto, ImpactStory and Crossref Event Data offer altmetric services, and each of these companies tracks a combination of different sources and uses different formulae for calculation of the AAS. [ 6 ] The values of the AAS are freely available and easily identifiable at the centre of the colourful donut badge embedded in the published article.…”

An analysis of journalism articles achieving high Altmetric attention scores

“…Some of the sources for calculating AAS are news outlets, blogs, policy documents, social networks (such as Twitter and Facebook), Wikipedia and citations (Kim et al, 2019). Limitations of the AAS include the sources covered by http://altmetric.com and its exhaustiveness (Robinson‐García et al, 2014) and the unclear calculation method (García‐Villar, 2021).…”