Altmetrics

Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing your narrative:

• Use plain language; avoid jargon
• Add context when you can, e.g. in addition to listing the number of news outlets, give a bit more detail like which news outlets are sharing your work or what the headlines are
• Don’t use the Altmetric Attention Score unless you provide more context
• What kind of impact are you trying to describe?
• Global impact – consider highlighting the number of countries your work has been shared in
• Public impact – look to news, social media, wikipedia, etc.

For some examples and additional resources: https://www.altmetric.com/blog/how-to-write-impact-statements-with-altmetric-data/

Universities often include altmetrics and related concepts like social media engagement requirements in their tenure & promotion preparation guidelines. Taking the time to review relevant altmetrics and engagement with your work may help bolster attempts to display the impact of your work.

Resources

• “The use of altmetrics for promotion & tenure”
• “How to use altmetrics for promotion & tenure” [how-to guide]

Factors that can help to generate and demonstrate research impact include

• having a DOI
• being open access
• using social media to ‘reach out’ to researchers and the public
• having a communications strategy.

Altmetrics that track and count ‘mentions’ of research on the Internet can, along with traditional citation metrics, demonstrate impact. Of value in telling the full story about a research output are platforms that ‘pull together’ both forms and provide contextualised altmetrics rather than counts of views or downloads.