So what is the site about?

Altmetric is a London-based start-up firm specializing in “alternative article-level metrics”. Unlike more traditional ways of gauging the importance of a scientific paper, such as counting the number of citations or looking at the reputation of the journal that published it, alternative metrics attempt to measure a paper’s impact using factors such as the number of blog posts about the paper and the number of times that it gets mentioned on Twitter and other social media. Altmetric’s blog, like many run by commercial firms, is partly geared towards advertising the company’s own products, which include a numerical “score” that reflects how often a paper has been discussed in the publications, blogs and social-media sites that Altmetric monitors. However, the blog also covers more general issues surrounding the emerging field of altmetrics and the related open access movement in scholarly publishing (see “The reality of open access”). Some posts, for example, offer case studies on ways that particular papers have been shared via social media or discuss the type of information that next-generation altmetrics might offer.

What if I don’t care whether my papers are popular on Twitter or not?

In that case, you are either less shallow than most people or you are already so well known that you have become blasé about publicity. Congratulations. However, there are reasons other than vanity for wanting to quantify other people’s responses to your work. Citations and a journal’s impact factor are still important barometers, of course, and the online versions of some journals (including many of those produced by IOP Publishing, which also publishes Physics World) have also started to provide additional data on how many people have downloaded papers or bookmarked them using online reference managers such as Mendeley and CiteULike. However, funding organizations increasingly want to know how a grant applicant’s work is affecting people outside the research community as well as in it. Think about the last scientific paper you wrote. How many people read it? What did they think of it? Did they share it with their colleagues? Their friends? Journalists? If you can demonstrate that, say, 14 people, including two journalists, found your last paper interesting enough to blog about, while 23 others passed it on to their Twitter followers, it might just tip the balance in your favour the next time you find yourself applying for funding.

That could be useful – but who’s behind it?

Altmetric was founded in 2011 by Euan Adie, a former medical geneticist who had previously worked on online research tools at Nature. Later that year the firm won start-up funding in a competition run by the publishing giant Elsevier and it has subsequently received support from Digital Science, which (like Nature) is part of the Macmillan group of publishers. The editor of the blog, Jean Liu, has a background in neuroscience and also writes a personal blog called The Portable Brain.

Can you give me a sample quote?

From a post about the altmetrics of a paper on bio-inspired dynamical surfaces: “These special surfaces, which were inspired by the sweeping motions of motile cilia, were created by applying a novel material that has the ability to repel bacteria that make up biofilms. It works like this: some kind of stimulus (e.g. electrical voltage, mechanical stretching or air pressure) is applied to the material, deforming the surface and dislodging any biofilms that are attached. The practical applications are immense: notably, the material could be painted on the hulls of ships, then used to stop “biofouling” by the easy removal of accumulated gunk (biofilms and barnacles).

For a paper with such useful applications (biofouling is a huge problem for mariners), how can one define the outcomes that would constitute impact? Even after more development and rigorous testing takes place, it may take years for the new technology to be adopted by shipbuilders. And so, for the time being, we should try to look for more immediate indicators of academic and online impact … altmetrics can be excellent early indicators of research uptake in society.”