Uncovering impacts: A case study in using altmetrics tools

Abstract

Growing scholarly use of Web tools present an opportunity to track alternative impacts along heretofore invisible paths like reading, bookmarking, and discussing. We present two tools, CitedIn and total-impact, that gather and report these and other "altmetrics" After discussing the tools features, we use a set of 214 articles from a national research center as a demonstration case study. We find that both tools present a meaningful number and variety of altmetrics in a form that could be used for immediate evaluation, and call for more research into the properties and validity of altmetrics.