In 2010, Jason Priem, Dario Taraborelli, Paul Groth and Cameron Neylon published a manifesto advocating for the use of online tools to create new generation filters for sorting scholarly literature based on relevance and significance. They called these new filters altmetrics.
Altmetrics (short for alternative metrics) are metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. They can include (but are not limited to) peer reviews, citations in public policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream media coverage, bookmarks in reference managers, and mentions on social networks.
Sourced from the web, altmetrics can tell you a lot about how often journal articles and other scholarly outputs like datasets are discussed and used around the world.
For providers to be able to track altmetrics, they require the research output to have a unique identifier, such as PubMedID, arXiv ID, SSRN ID, RePEC ID, URN, ISBN or DOI and for the research to be mentioned in a source they track. Providers then collate the mentions and turn the statistics into graphics.
References: Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P., and Neylon, C., 2010. 'Altmetrics: A manifesto', Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12684249
