Moving forward with article level metrics: introducing altmetrics

Abstract

In a prior editorial we discussed the journal impact factor (IF), including how this figure has been steadily increasing for the International Journal of Clinical Practice 1. The most recent IF (2014) for the journal is 2.566 and the International Journal of Clinical Practice is ranked 35th of the 153 journals in the General and Internal Medicine category. The IF of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years. For example, an IF of 2.566 for 2014 means that papers published in 2012 and 2013 received on average 2.566 citations each in 2014. As this is an average, actual citation rates for individual articles can range from zero citations to many 2. A new measure of the importance or impact of individual articles in a journal has recently become available. You may have noticed when accessing many new articles on-line that article level metrics are now displayed 3-5. Called an ‘Altmetric score’, this number provides an indicator of the amount of attention that the article has received. The score is a weighted count calculated using an automated algorithm taking into account mentions of the article in the news (with a greater weight being placed for mentions in an outlet such as The New York Times compared with smaller publications), blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube and other popular media sources. The Altmetric score does not rate the quality of the article, but is a reflection of the ‘buzz’ it creates and the potential impact it may have. This issue of the International Journal of Clinical Practice includes a letter to the editor that was published on-line in Early View on 1 June 2015 6. At the time of this writing about 6 weeks later (15 July 2015), the letter's Altmetric score is an astonishing 76, and may be higher at the time you are reading this. This is one of the highest ever scores for the journal and is in the 98th percentile of all articles of the same age. So far, this article is in the top 5% of all articles for all journals tracked by Altmetric. The reason for all this attention? The topic is about high-heeled shoes and how ankle strength is important, an issue that appears to resonate strongly in the lay press. Clearly a high Altmetric score is different than a citation count, and citations take a much longer time to accumulate. A research project for the future will be if Altmetric scores corrrelate with the number of times an article is read on-line, as well as the number of citations it receives in the biomedical literature. No disclosures relevant to the content of this editorial.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.