Alternative metrics

What are alternative metrics?

Alternative metrics, offer a valuable tool for evaluating the online visibility of your research. They show both the quantity and character of attention your publications receive across diverse sources, including:

• Social media (likes, retweets, comments)
• Public policy documents
• Patent citations
• News articles and mainstream media
• Blog posts
• Wikipedia

Why use alternative metrics?

Alternative metrics complement traditional measures, providing a more well-rounded societal view of when, how, and where your research is engaged with.

Data is gathered as soon as your research output is published with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which can be beneficial for recent publications or disciplines where traditional metrics may not have been generated or be readily available, e.g. humanities and social sciences.

Where do you find alternative metrics?

Alternative metrics can be gathered from personal social media platforms, media outlets, like The Conversation, or from repositories where your research is stored, like aCQUIRe.

Altmetrics Explorer is a website that allows you to analyse and generate reports on your alternative metrics attention data, including the Altmetric Donut.

Many library catalogues and databases such as Scopus, have also integrated alternative metrics tools into their systems so you can view publication metrics. 

How do I use alternative metrics?

To generate alternative metrics around your research output share its Digital Object Identifier (DOI) across social media, blogs, Wikipedia, and media platforms. 

Depositing it into aCQUIRe via Research Elements will also allow alternative metrics to be captured.

Like all metrics, alternative metrics need to be used responsibly. See Evaluating your research outputs for more information.