ALTMETRICS

n.

Tools used to assess the impact of scholarly articles based on alternative online measures such as bookmarks, links, blog posts, and tweets. Also: alt-metrics. [Alternative + metrics.]

Luckily, there is a growing movement within the scientific establishment to better measure and reward all the different ways that people contribute to the messy and complex process of scientific progress. This movement has begun to gather loosely around the banner of "altmetrics," which was born out of a simple recognition: Many of the traditional measurements are too slow or simplistic to keep pace with today's internet-age science.

—Samuel Arbesman, " New Ways to Measure Science: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/new-ways-to-measure-science/all/1," Wired Science, January 9, 2012

An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. "There's a gold mine of data that hasn't been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact," says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea.

—Jennifer Howard, " Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online: http://chronicle.com/article/As-Scholarship-Goes-Digital/130482/," The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 29, 2012

I like the term \#articlelevelmetrics, but it fails to imply *diversity* of measures.Lately, I'm liking \#altmetrics.

—Jason Priem, \@jasonpriem: https://twitter.com/\#!/jasonpriem/status/25844968813, Twitter, September 28, 2010

Although the prudent neologism collector must at all times be on guard against Twitter-based coinages that are just silly (an adjective that can be rightfully applied to the vast majority of such terms), exceptions sometimes cry out to be made. To wit, I offer you tweetation, a tweet that cites a scholarly article:

For the purpose of this paper, I call a citation in a tweet (mentioning a journal article URL) a "tweetation", to distinguish it from a citation in a journal article (which is the metric I compared tweetations against).

—Gunther Eysenbach, " Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/," Journal of Medical Internet Research, December 16, 2011

biometrics

flotsametrics

stylometrician

Blogging

Internet

Social Networking

Science (General)