Published March 16, 2020
First used as a hashtag and codified more than a decade ago, altmetrics present a more comprehensive alternative to the traditional citation impact criteria of scientific publishing. Mainstream media, online-first publications, social and academic networks, public policy documents, post-publication forums, Wikipedia even—these complementary bibliometrics help to paint a truer picture of engagement with scholarly work, especially work that finds second, often third lives beyond the towers of academia.
Altmetric.com is a data science company uniquely leveraged to capture this full array of online sources and collate all the disparate activity accordingly. In fact, just to the right of the abstract for every AJR article published on AJRonline.org, you will now see a multicolored “donut” badge visualizing a real-time summary of the attention that article is receiving (red for news outlets, orange for blogs, blues for social media, etc.) For numerical context, you will notice the data output gets assigned an Altmetric Attention Score, a high-level assessment of both the quality and the quantity of attention said AJR article is receiving, weighted according to the relative reach of each attention source, itself.
Perhaps most importantly, if you click anywhere on the embedded donut, then you will be directed to a dedicated AJR Altmetric details page. Here, you, too, can follow the myriad conversations this specific AJR article is engendering—geographic and demographically—in one convenient, shareable URL.
Want to be notified whenever someone shares or discusses the details for a certain AJR article? You can sign up for e-mail alerts under the Summary Tab of any AJR Altmetric details page. While you are free to sign up for notifications regarding multiple AJR Altmetric research outputs, you will only receive a single email alert, sent via once-a-day digest.
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