Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has announced the addition of Altmetric data to its journal program, a service that provides a more complete picture of how users engage with scholarly research online. Following the success of a six-month pilot on Wiley Open Access titles in 2013, the service will be available for all journals by the end of July.
Designed to track and measure the broader impact of research online, Altmetric captures article mentions across social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ as well as traditional media, online reference managers, post-publication peer-review sites, and public policy documents. Altmetric analyses and adds context to the data for researchers, authors and editors tracking approximately 100,000 mentions a week, with some 3,000 articles covered each day.
Altmetric allows users to see all of the original mentions of each article and displays a score measuring how much attention each individual article has received. The score is based on three main factors: the number of individuals mentioning a paper, where the mentions occurred, and the author of the mention. 77 percent of users during Wiley's Altmetric pilot felt that the Altmetric data available added value to the article. Most used the information to gauge the overall popularity of articles, find researchers in the same field, or understand a paper's influence.
