"Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship." according to altmetrics.org.
Altmetrics stands for Alternative Metrics. The term first appeared in a tweet as a hashtag (#altmetrics) in 2010 about article level metrics. Since then many articles have been written about altmetrics and several tools have been developed to track altmetrics.
Why should we care about altmetrics?
Altmetrics are new metrics used to measure the impact of web-native scholarship fast and in various ways. They
2008 - JMIR publishing views and tweets.
2009 - PLoS ALM Project.
2010 - birth of the term Altmetrics & Altmetrics Manifesto v.1 (http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/).
2011 - Total-Impact project, later relaunched as Impact Story.
2011 - Altmetric.com founded
June 201 - Altmetrics11 Workshop (An ACM Web Science Conference workshop, and it is now annual.)
Late 201 - Plum Analytics founded.
2012 - OASPA Conference (included a session on article metrics with talks by BioMed Central, PLoS, and Plum Analytics)
2012 - ASCB initiated San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) (launched in May 2013.)
In June 2013, NISO awarded a grant for a two-phase initiative on Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Project .
Jan 2014 - EBSCO acquired Plum Analytics
Sept 12, 2014 - Plum Analytics partners with ORCID
Sept 25-26, 2014 - the1st Altmetrics Conference (London)
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