Alternative metrics, or social impact include other impacts of a work, such as the number of article views, numbers of downloads, or mentions in social media and news media.
Alternative metrics will normally be available sooner than traditional citation metrics, which are dependant on journal publishing cycles.
Altmetrics —short for alternative metrics—is a measure of web-based scholarly interaction. It aims to measure how often research is tweeted, blogged about, downloaded or bookmarked. Its development can be seen as a response to the impact of social networking on the research environment.
See the Altmetrics manifesto, posted on altmetrics.org, for further explanation about the development of this approach to measuring scholarly impact.
Find futher tools on the Altmetrics.org Tools page
To improve your altmetric scores you need to create an online presence and share information about your work and your research outputs online. There are many ways to do this such as:
Blog - Blog about your articles or work and ask others to write blog posts about your work.
Tweet - Become active on Twitter and tweet links to your articles and other work.
Use social networks for researchers - Create a profile and add your publication list to social networking sites for researchers, such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley.
Register for researcher IDs Register for IDs such as an ORCID id, ResearcherID and keep your list of publications up-to-date.
Make all your research outputs available online - Make all your research outputs including data, code, videos and presentations available online by using on content hosting tools such as figshare, Dryad, YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, SourceForge or GitHub.
Deposit your work in an institutional or subject repository - Deposit your work in the CDU Research Webportal, or a subject-specific repository for example, arXiv, a repository for physics and mathematics.