Evaluating Journals for Quality and Legitimacy

Altmetric reports the mentions of scholarly works on social media sites, scholarly bookmarking services and science news outlets.  Altmetric uses an attention score along with a colorful “donut” to signify how much and what type of attention a research output has received.  The colors of the donut represent a different source of attention, i.e. one color signifies Facebook mentions while another color corresponds to attention in policy documents.

The Altmetric Attention Score is automatically calculated and is a weighted count of all the attention a research output has received.  The score is based on three factors: volume, sources, and authors.  Volume measures the number of people mentioning the article or research.  The source factor considers where the mention is coming from and weighs it’s influence in the score.  For example, a newspaper article contributes to a higher score more than a blog post or a tweet would.  Altmetric scores also consider the author of each mention and how often they talk about scholarly articles or if they seem to have a bias towards a particular journal or publisher.  These scores are combined into a weighted approximation of the attention that research output has received, and are not a measure of the quality of the research or the researcher.

Altmetric offers a free bookmarklet which can be installed to your web browser and allows users to view the online shares and mentions of an article with a single click. The bookmarklet works on PubMed, arXiv, and pages containing a DOI with Google Scholar friendly citation metadata.  A free Altmetric badge can also be installed on an individual researcher's personal webpage.

Plum Analytics is another altmetric tool that provides insight into how people are interacting with articles and research outputs online.  It was purchased by Elsevier and is influenced by data in Scopus and online.  It tracks metrics in Five different categories: citations, usage, captures, mentions, and social media.  Each category is identified with a particular color.

Citations capture both traditional citation indexes like Scopus, as well as citations indicating societal impact such as clinical or policy citations.  Usage signifies anyone reading the article or using the research.  Captures indicate that someone wants to come back to the research output and can be a leading indicator of future citations.  Mentions is the category indicating references or mentions of the research in a news article or on a blog post.  Social Media includes tweets, Facebook likes, and other mentions of the article or research via social media.  Plum Analytics doesn’t provide a weighted score for each category, instead it simply provides the number of citations, captures, etc., which the article has had thus far.

Many Plum Analytics metrics are embedded within databases and can be found in Scopus, EBSCOhost, Science Direct, and others.

Plum analytics offers embeddable widgets which researchers can use to display the metrics on their own website.

Mendeley is an online research-collaboration platform and academic database.  Mendeley's metrics include how often papers are downloaded and cited.  A simple search will provide the number of citations and readers a particular article has had.  Mendeley also provides these metrics for conference proceedings, theses, books, reports, magazine articles, etc., as long as the research output has been added to the database.