Almetrics

With the growth of social networks, habits in the use and consume of academic production have changed. More and more researchers are using blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to spread their papers and to be informed about resources of their interest.

In this context, some metric researchers propose a new way to calculate the impact of academic production called altmetrics. This term was coined in 2010 and aspires to incorporate the online activity around scholarly literature (views, discussions, bookmarking, citations, etc.) in the measurement of its impact. It is true this is a very controversial point of view, but it is also true almetrics is here to stay.

As a leader in this alternative metric, the start-up Almetric has just published Altmetric Top 100 2014, “a review of the 100 papers that received the most attention online, and the conversations that happened around them”. To elaborate this list, Almetric took into account “all mentions and shares of articles published from November 2013 onwards in mainstream and social media, blogs, post-publication peer-review forums, bookmarking sites and platforms such as Reddit and YouTube”.

You can filter the list by journal, institution, category, country and access type, and of each article you can see the number of mentions, and read them!, in each web service (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google +, etc.).

Even if you do not agree with almetrics... enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona