Citations are slow and narrow

Citations take years to accrue and only capture academic use. Altmetrics (alternative metrics) track other signals of attention: mentions in news and policy, social media shares, blog posts, downloads, and saves in tools like Mendeley.

What they add

  • Speed — evidence of attention in days, not years.
  • Breadth — reach beyond academia (public, practitioners, policymakers).
  • Complementary — they sit alongside citations, not replace them.
Worked example — the altmetric “donut”
An article shows a coloured altmetric badge: 3 news outlets, 120 tweets, 2 policy documents, 400 Mendeley saves. That tells a story citations cannot — this work reached practitioners and the public — but a high score is attention, not quality. Hype and outrage also score.

🔗 Learn more (free): Altmetric — what altmetrics are and how they work

Try it
Find an article with an altmetric badge (many journals show one). What kinds of attention did it get beyond citations?

Self-check

Give one strength and one weakness of altmetrics compared with citation counts.

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Adapted in part from openly-licensed UNESCO (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) and institutional research-support materials. Linked resources remain under their own licences. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.

Última modificación: jueves, 4 de junio de 2026, 12:48