Watson, Roger

Nursing Open

English

PubMed

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EDITORIALWhat are Altmetrics and why would anyone be interested?Roger Watson, Editor, Nursing Opendoi: 10.1002/nop2.55Go to the landing page of Nursing Open and click on anissue and then on an article and above the tabs that takeyou to the content of the article you will see a colouredindicator labelled ‘AM score’ and, in some cases, a num-ber next to it. That number is the Altmetric score; Alt-metrics being a contraction of ‘alternative metrics’. Thisscore indicates the extent to which the article has receivedattention on social media sites, such as Twitter and onblogs. If you hover over the ‘AM score’, you will getinformation such as the number of times the link to thearticle has been mentioned on, for example, Twitter orFacebook. If you click on the indicator, then you willopen up a more detailed webpage showing a map of theWorld and the countries where the mentions came fromfilled in and also the demographic breakdown of thosementioning the article. You may be puzzled about why,sometimes, the number of mentions does not equal thescore which may be lower or higher than the number ofmentions. This is because Altmetric scores are weighted.For example, a mention on a blog is worth five pointscompared with a mention on Twitter, which is worthone point. Some mentions are worth less than 1, forexample, YouTube and LinkedIn.Above is an explanation of what the Altmetric scoreis, but what should we be interested? As an editor, I aminterested to see how much impact what we publish has;likewise, the publishers wish to know. Traditional metrics,such as total citations and impact factors remainimportant measures of impact, or influence, on the scien-tific community but they are flawed. Altmetrics are notperfect either but they add to the information we haveabout how much attention as article is receiving and theiruse acknowledges the power of social media. The aim ofmost authors was to have their work read and cited inother works. This, at least, indicates that their work hasbeen found useful – if not necessarily agreed with – andhas helped someone else to frame their work or theirarguments. Towards that end, mentions on social mediaare known to predict and possibly increase citations toarticles (Eysenbach 2011, Knight 2014), therefore, moni-toring Altmetrics – which are almost instant – can be use-ful in indicating the extent to which an article is likely tobe cited. It is also an explanation of why we have a blogand a Twitter site at Nursing Open and why moreauthors are turning to social media to promote theirwork.ReferencesEysenbach G. (2011) Can tweets predict citations? Metrics ofsocial impact based on Twitter and correlation withtraditional metrics of scientific impact. Journal of MedicalInternet Research 13(4), e123.Knight S.R. (2014) Social media and online attention as anearly measure of the impact of research in solid organtransplantation. Transplantation 98, 490–496.ª 2016 The Authors. Nursing Open published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.1

What are Altmetrics and why would anyone be interested?

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What are Altmetrics and why would anyone be interested?

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