Altmetrics

What are altmetrics?

Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, provide indicators to measure the impact of research. These indicators differ from "traditional" metrics (the number of citations received, the impact factor...). Altmetrics work at an article (or book chapter, or paper) level and are based on the social web. Specifically, they focus on how web users have interacted with it. E.g. What impact has an article had on the network? How many times has it been downloaded, disseminated on Twitter or Facebook, exported to Mendeley, shared on Reddit, cited on Wikipedia? This new way of measuring the influence of research output, making use of the tools available on the Internet, has been well received and more and more journals, databases, catalogs and repositories are including this information in their documents.
 

Almetrics in DDD

The DDD altmetrics counter is provided by Altmetric, which compiles multiple data and summarizes them into a single indicator called Altmetric Attention Score. The counter can only be used in documents that have a DOI or Pubmed Identifier (PMDID). It starts working as soon as the system detects an interaction with the document (e.g., if the document has been cited on Twitter). 
You will see the counter in the record of each document, next to, if it is the case, the citation counters in Scopus and Web of Science.
If you click on See more details you will go to the Altmetric website where you can examine the data in more detail. There you can also see what is known as the Altmetric "donut", a graphical representation of the metrics that aims to make them easy to understand.

                                    

(the image is of the altmetrics of the article Associations of autozygosity with a broad range of human phenotypes available at DDD)

 

Why altmetrics?

• They show the impact in real time: they allow us to know the influence of the research from the very day of its publication. This aspect is very useful in disciplines and geographic areas that are not normally represented in databases such as the Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus, or where citation behaviour is slow and it takes months or years to generate the first citation, as it is the case of social sciences or humanities.
• Altmetrics can detect a wider range of impacts than citation-based metrics: they can complement citations, get a more complete picture of the publication’s impact.
• They can be applied to non-traditional formats, other than books and journal articles: more and more researchers are sharing data, software, presentations and other scholarly output online. This means that we can track its use on the web as easily as we can with books and articles.
• Article-level metrics: They measure the impact of a particular article or research output and not just the journal that contains it.

This metrics also has drawbacks. At present, the main one is that it is not standardized and therefore it can hardly be used in scientific evaluation. It is not exhaustive in the collection of blogs, Twitter or other networks and has a strong Anglo-Saxon bias. If you are interested in the subject, you can see the guide prepared by the Library of the University of Seville.

 

DDD Statistics

You can see the search and download statistics for each document by clicking on the "Usage statistics" tab in the top menu of each document page.
By searching we mean retrieving DDD record, or downloading the full text when this is not done from the full record display.
By downloading we mean the access to the file that contains the full text of a document or, if it is not text, the display of any other type of file (photographs, posters...). This download can be done fromthe complete record or directly from a search engine. In records containing more than one folder the total number of  downloads is considered.