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New Faculty & Instructors: Getting Started at the SWOSU Libraries: Tools for Tenure III

Altmetrics - Article Level Metrics

Altmetrics were created to provide an alternative source to traditional, publishing impact metrics like impact factor, h-index, g-index, etc. Altmetrics provides insight into public opinion about research online that include article views, downloads or social media mentions/postings. Using altmetrics can provide understanding of how your work is gaining attention and showcases the impact of your work to your professional field or the general public.

Article Level Metrics

  • H1 Connect
    When Faculty Members recommend an article for Faculty Opinions, they also write a brief review explaining what makes the article so important and rate it as 'Good', 'Very Good' or 'Exceptional' (equivalent to scores of 1, 2 or 3 stars, respectively). Faculty Opinions uses the individual scores to calculate the total scores for each article, which are used to rank the articles in each discipline.
  • PLoS (Public Library of Science) Article Level Metrics
    A leading open access journal repository for scientists, PLoS offers metrics that track the influence of individual PLoS articles from times downloaded to mentions in social media and blogs. Only PLoS articles are tracked and benefit from these metrics. Thus far, this tool is fairly narrow in coverage.
  • SSRN (Views and Downloads)
    An online article repository that includes a database of more than 400,000 abstracts, electronic articles and specialized subject networks where researchers can promote their work and connect to other scholars' work. Like Mendeley and PLoS, there are site-specific metrics for top papers, authors, and institutions in the social sciences.

Readership Metrics

  • Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. It is very popular with researchers in the sciences.

Social Media Metrics 

  • ImpactStory
    A free open source tool designed to support open access publishing through the aggregation of online altmetrics. Users create "collections" of materials through such open tools as Google Scholar Profiles, DOIs, and PubMed IDs. Impact Story aggregates material from popular social media as well as scholarly tools like Mendeley and PLoS.
  • PlumX Metrics
    PlumX gathers data regarding usage, captures, mentions, social media engagement, and citations from article databases, journal webpages and institutional repositories like SWOSU Digital Commons.