The impact of academic research has long been measured using citations, often with the Journal Impact Factor being used to assess individual publications within it. However, the Impact Factor is a journal level - not an article level - metric and, as academic publishing and the surrounding discussion moves increasingly onto the web, novel opportunities to track and assess the impact of individual scientific publications have emerged.
These web-based approaches are starting to offer an article-level perspective of the way research is disseminated, discussed and integrated across the web. The hope is that a broader set of metrics to complement citations will eventually give a more comprehensive view of article impact, ... .
Altmetric.com is one of a growing number of web-based tools taking a novel approach to the assessment of scholarly impact – it aggregates the mentions on twitter and social media sites, and coverage in online reference managers, mainstream news sources and blogs to present an overview of the interest a published article is receiving online. BioMed Central has today added the Altmetic.com 'donut' to the about page of published articles – the donut will display for articles receiving coverage which has been tracked by Altmetric.com, along with an article score ... .
The donut visualization shown on the 'about this article' page aims convey information about the type of attention the article has received ... .
This summary supplements our existing article-level measures of impact – article accesses and citations are displayed on all 'about this article' pages, ... . [snip].
As more indicators of article performance, visibility and impact emerge, the hope is that authors, readers and funding institutions will be able to assess research impact in a way which is more informed than relying on Impact Factors alone. [snip]. We plan to keep adding to this range of metrics and indicators, as they continue to expose a fuller image of research impact.
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