Research Impact and Author Profiles

Altmetrics: The number of downloads, tweets, blog posts, likes, bookmarks, etc. in social media which are used in analyze researcher and citation impact. Altmetrics offer a faster and wider-ranging measures of how people discussing and using your work.

Plum X - A free online database which calculates citations, usage, mentions, captures and social media hits and generates data visualization charts.

Altmetric Bookmarklet - A free bookmarklet you add to your browser's toolbar. When you visit any paper online you can view artilce-level metrics by clicking on it. 

PLOS One - A peer-reviewed open access publisher that provides altmetric data for each article and a platform for article discussions. 

F1000 - Peer-reviewed open access platform that offers altmetric data for each article and a platform for artilce discussions. 

PubMed Commons -  A new feature in PubMed that allows researchers to comment on articles

ResearchGate - A researcher social networking site that generates altmetric reports and tracks and promotes researchers' works

Mendeley - Citatation management software that combines social networking features. This tools tracks downloads, bookmarking, and sharing of works.

Figshare - A platform for publishing research data sets and tracking views, shares, cites (coming soon)

Guidelines do not exist for using altmetrics in creating an impact story. This area is new and promising, but still developing in the literature.  A recent article in Nature (Peplow, 2013) hypothesized that re-citations and download/views will be important measures to consider moving forward.

A team from the NIH recently presented a paper proposing a new metric, Relative Citation Ratio or RCR, for evaluating the impact of a set of publications.

Online tool (beta-test) RCR

A review of the tool highlights the new formula and the authors' claims.