Overview of the Altmetrics Landscape

While the impact of article citations has been examined for decades, the “altmetrics” movement has exploded in the past year. Altmetrics tracks the activity on the Social Web and looks at research outputs besides research articles. Publishers of scientific research have enabled altmetrics on their articles, open source applications are available for platforms to display altmetrics on scientific research, and subscription models have been created that provide altmetrics. In the future, altmetrics will be used to help identify the broader impact of research and to quickly identify high-impact research.