Altmetrics

Altmetrics are measures of attention and engagement with a piece of research outside traditional citation counts, including mentions on social media, coverage in news and policy documents, saves in reference managers, and download or view counts.

Altmetrics are typically aggregated by tracking a paper's identifier, such as a DOI, across social platforms, news outlets, and other online sources, producing a composite score or a breakdown by source. This differs fundamentally from citation analysis and the h-index, which measure formal scholarly citation and can take years to accumulate, altmetrics can register attention within days of publication, at the cost of measuring visibility rather than scholarly validation.

Altmetrics are useful for tracking early interest in a paper, demonstrating public or policy engagement for grant reporting, and surfacing work that reaches practitioners or the public without necessarily being highly cited in the academic literature; they are also sometimes used alongside journal impact factor and other measures when evaluating a paper's reach. Pitfalls include a high altmetric score that can reflect controversy or a catchy headline rather than research quality, and the fact that altmetrics are not a substitute for peer review or citation-based measures, they answer a different question about attention, not validity, and matter differently for open access work that is easier for the public to find and share in the first place.