Genesis of altmetrics or article-level metrics for measuring efficacy of scholarly communications: Current perspectives

Abstract

The Article-level metrics or altmetrics becomes a new trendsetter in recent times for measuring impact of scientific publications and their social outreach to intended audiences. The popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin and social bookmarks such as Mendeley and CiteULike are nowadays widely used for communicating research to larger transnational audiences. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) got signed by the scientific and researchers communities across the world. This Declaration has given preference to the article-level metrics (ALM) or altmetrics over traditional but faulty journal impact factor (JIF)-based assessment of career scientists. JIF does not consider impact or influence beyond citations count, as this count reflected only through Thomson Reuters Web of Science database. Also JIF provides indicator related to a journal, but not related to a published paper. Thus, altmetrics now becomes an alternative metrics for performance assessment of individual scientists and their contributed scholarly publications. This paper provides a glimpse of genesis of altmetrics in measuring efficacy of scholarly communications. This paper also highlights available altmetric tools and social platforms linking altmetric tools, which are widely used in deriving altmetric scores of scholarly publications.