Altmetrics 101

Altmetrics has been popping up more and more in the course of my work as a hospital librarian. We've had a few people inquire about how they can see if their publications have any social media mentions, tweets, shares and the like. 

Before we get in too deep, here is a nice beginning tutorial on altmetrics. 

Our health care system doesn't subscribe to a separate service to help us measure these non-traditional measures of scholarly and research impact. Perhaps some of you are in the same boat? Here are two free altmetric tools that I have used. If you know of more free tools I'd love to hear about them. 

• PlumX embedded in EBSCOhost databases. PlumX, an EBSCO company, now embeds altmetric statis inside their databases. If you get CINAHL or any other databases via EBSCOhost, you will see altmetrics for articles. 

• Altmetric it! bookmarklet. This free widget from Altmetrics.org will let you see altmetrics on PubMed, arXiv, or most articles with a DOI.