Altmetrics is a developing field of study of new metrics based on data collected from a variety of sources including the social web. This new area of metrics was coined "altmetrics" by Jason Priem in 2010 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. A document's altmetric score provides an indicator of its influence in society. Altmetric scores take into account the number of times an article is read or mentioned and is weighted by the importance of the mentioner and by the source. For example, an article mentioned in a newspaper would be weighted more heavily than a mention in a tweet by an individual. Many journals include some altmetrics on their websites that include views, downloads and social media mentions.
ScienceDirect includes altmetric scores for articles published in over 200 journals. The altmetrics in the ScienceDirect database are provided by Altmetric.com and are based on these factors:
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Mentions of articles are tracked in the following source types:
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In addition to the altmetric score, ScienceDirect provides specific source counts, the number of readers, and their geographic location.
