Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has launched a trial of Altmetric, a service that tracks and measures the impact of scholarly articles and datasets on both traditional and social media. The six month trial will run on a number of subscription and open access journals published by Wiley including Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, BJU International, Brain and Behavior, Methods in Ecology and Evolution and EMBO Molecular Medicine.
As part of the trial, Altmetric will track social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, blogs, newspapers, magazines and online reference managers like Mendeley and CiteULike for mentions of scholarly articles published in the journals included in the trial. Altmetric will create and display a score for each article measuring the quality and quantity of attention that the particular article has received. The Altmetric score is based on three main factors: the number of individuals mentioning a paper, where the mentions occurred and how often the author of each mention talks about the article.
Article level metrics are emerging as important tools to quantify how individual articles are shared, used and discussed. These are being used in conjunction with more traditional metrics focused on long-term impact of a collection of articles found in a journal based on the number of citations.
