What is impact and what are altmetrics?
Altmetrics allow people to measure and monitor the reach and impact of scholarship and research through online interactions. Altmetrics stands for "alternative metrics." The "alternative" part references traditional measurements of academic success such as citation counts, journal prestige (impact factor), and author H-index. Altmetrics are meant to complement, not totally replace, these traditional measures. Supporters of the altmetrics movement believe that doing so will give a more complete picture of how research and scholarship is used. Simply, altmetrics are metrics beyond traditional citations.
Using this guide, you'll see how social media can help you at all stages of your research: from exploration to engagement, from planning to publicising, and much more.
With ready access to a vast range of people and data, social media offers much potential for conducting research. However, the ethical framework relating to research using social media has not been very well-developed, and there are still many questions for a would-be social media researcher to consider.
Social media is a fast-moving, ever-expanding area. Therefore, this guide just highlights a selection of resources, particularly those which are well-used by researchers, are free, and relatively stable.
This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). It is a reworked version of Newcastle University's Social Media for Research Guide.
