Social Media Influence of Journal Articles: Show It at Your Own Web Browser

As a researcher, you care about how much attention your research output is getting. A simple tool called Bookmarklet can give a quick view of metrics of your published works and other papers.

To assess the influence of a published work, traditionally we count how often the work has been cited, i.e. citation counts. As researchers increasing use social media to communicate, the kinds of online attention a research is getting can also indicate its impact. Such alternative metrics, called altmetrics, captures a diverse range of social media activities such as sharing in Facebook, Twitter and blogs, mentioning in Wikipedia articles and newspapers, and many more.

There are a wide range of social media activities that can be captured, therefore there are different “flavors” of altmetrics. One major company producing such non-traditional metrics is called, simply, Altmetric. Its algorithms compile an online attention score for each published work that has a doi (digital object identifier, a type of PID). The score and the range of metrics are presented as a badge. Here is an example:

For this article “Evidence for the spin-0 nature of the Higgs boson using ATLAS data”, Altmetric calculated an attention score of 92 (as of August 2019); the article appeared in over 100 tweets and 3 Facebook pages.

“See more details” link shows you more information such as geographic distribution of the tweets, and what the score means in terms of impact:

Using Bookmarklet

How to find the Altmetric badge of a particular article? Some publishers and repositories are using the free API by Altmetric to embed badges in their systems; the HKUST Institutional repository (IR) being one of them. For example, you can see the badge of the article mentioned before in its IR record. You can also use Bookmarklet to show you the badge of any article of your interest. It is a free and handy tool offered by Altmetric. Follow this simple instruction, you can then use the “Almetric It” bookmark at your browser; it can show you the Altmetric data if available.

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