Redefining impact – altmetrics now on journals from BMJ
21 Oct, 13 | by BMJ
In growing numbers, scholars are moving their daily work to the Internet. Online reference managers, such as Zotero and Mendeley, have grown in popularity, the latter claiming to store over 470 million articles (substantially more than PubMed). In addition, as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter and a growing number cultivate scholarly blogs.
As a result of the increasing scholarly use of social tools like Twitter, Facebook and Mendeley, there is a need to track scholarly impact on the social web by creating new filters. The call for new metrics has been answered by a group of researchers who have dubbed the movement as ‘altmetrics‘.
In support of this year’s theme for Open Access Week, ‘redefining impact’, BMJ has introduced the Altmetric widget across all articles published in BMJ’s portfolio of journals.*
Altmetric is an analytical tool which allows users to track and analyse online activity around scholarly literature. As an author, you can measure the online impact of your research, and as a reader, you have quick and easy ways to see which papers are receiving the most attention.
All articles in journals from BMJ will now feature the Altmetric donut (see above) showing each article’s Altmetric score and a breakdown of its coverage on social media sites, blogs, newspapers, magazines and more. Readers can click on the donut to see more details, including a full list of all tweets relating to that particular paper.
In light of this, BMJ has compiled a list of the Top 12 Open Access articles from BMJ gaining the most attention in social and digital media over the past year, which can be found on our Rebelmouse page. The page will also be pulling in top tweets from the #oaweek hashtag.
* Excluding The BMJ.
