Altmetrics Explained: Beyond Impact Factor for Modern Journals
Reviewed by the NeucitePress Editorial Board — PhD academics, peer-reviewed journal editors and medical communication specialists.
Last updated: July 2026 • Reviewed by the NeucitePress Editorial Board • Reading time: 8 minutes
For decades, the journal impact factor was treated as the default proxy for research quality and importance, even though it measures only one thing: how often articles in a journal are cited by other articles, averaged over a short window and computed at the journal level rather than the individual article level. Altmetrics emerged as a response to that narrowness — a family of metrics that track attention to individual research outputs across a much wider range of sources, in something closer to real time. This guide explains what altmetrics are, how they relate to (and differ from) citation-based metrics, how the best-known scoring system works, where altmetrics fall short, and how journals and authors can use them without over-interpreting them.
What Altmetrics Actually Measure
“Altmetrics” (alternative metrics) is an umbrella term for measures of attention to a specific piece of research — usually an individual article, though the same approach can apply to datasets, preprints, or code — drawn from sources outside the traditional citation record. Common inputs include:
- Social media mentions: posts referencing the article on platforms such as X/Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
- News coverage: mentions in mainstream news outlets, which typically carry more weight in most altmetrics systems than a social media post, on the reasoning that a journalist chose to feature the work.
- Policy documents: citations in government reports, health agency guidance, or other policy documents, which is often considered one of the more meaningful altmetric signals because it reflects direct use of research to inform decisions.
- Blogs and post-publication commentary: mentions on academic or science blogs, including formal post-publication peer review platforms.
- Reference manager saves: the number of times an article has been added to a library in reference managers such as Mendeley or Zotero, which is often read as an early signal of scholarly interest before citations have had time to accumulate.
- Wikipedia citations, patents, and other niche sources: depending on the provider, altmetric tools may also track mentions in Wikipedia articles, patent filings, and syllabi.
The unifying idea is that citation counts are slow (they take months or years to accumulate) and narrow (they only capture engagement from other academics who go on to publish and cite), while altmetrics capture faster, broader signals of who is paying attention to a piece of research and how.
How Altmetrics Differ From, and Complement, Citation-Based Metrics
Citation counts and the journal impact factor answer a specific question: how much has this work been built upon by subsequent published scholarship? That is a meaningful but narrow lens. It says little about whether research is reaching clinicians, policymakers, journalists, or the public, and it says nothing at all in the weeks or months immediately after publication, when citations have not yet had time to accumulate. Altmetrics are not designed to replace citations; they are designed to fill in what citations cannot show:
- Speed: altmetric activity can appear within hours or days of publication, long before the first citation would normally appear.
- Breadth of audience: altmetrics can capture attention from journalists, clinicians, policymakers, teachers, and the public — audiences that citation counts, by definition, cannot see.
- Article-level rather than journal-level focus: the impact factor is a journal average; altmetrics are attached to the individual output, which is arguably a fairer unit of analysis for judging any single piece of work.
Used together, a strong citation record and strong altmetric attention tell a more complete story than either alone: a paper can be highly cited but largely invisible outside academia, or it can generate enormous public and media attention while accumulating relatively few formal citations (common for papers on topics of broad public interest, or those published very recently).
The Altmetric Attention Score
The best-known implementation is the Altmetric Attention Score, produced by the company Altmetric and often displayed as a colorful “donut” icon next to an article. The score is an automatically calculated, weighted count of the attention an output has received, based on three broad factors:
- Volume: how many times, and by how many distinct people, the output has been mentioned across tracked sources (repeated mentions from the same person in the same source generally count only once).
- Source: different sources are weighted differently — a mention in a major news outlet contributes more to the score than a blog post, which in turn contributes more than an individual social media post — on the assumption that different channels represent different editorial thresholds and reach.
- Author of the mention: the score also considers who is doing the mentioning — for example, how frequently that person or outlet talks about scholarly research at all, which helps the algorithm distinguish a specialist science journalist from an automated bot account.
The donut’s colors indicate where the attention is coming from rather than how much: different colors represent different source types (for example, distinguishing social media platforms, news outlets, blogs, and policy documents), so two articles with an identical numeric score can have very different-looking donuts depending on which channels drove the attention.
Criticisms and Limitations of Altmetrics
Altmetrics are useful precisely because they are broad, but that breadth is also their central weakness:
- Attention is not the same as quality. A controversial, misleading, or later-retracted paper can accumulate a very high altmetric score simply because it generated argument and shares, not because the underlying science was sound.
- Gaming and manipulation are possible. Because social media volume is one of the inputs, coordinated sharing (whether organic promotion or more deliberate manipulation) can inflate a score in ways that do not reflect scholarly merit.
- Coverage is uneven across disciplines and regions. Fields and topics with more public salience (health, climate, technology) tend to generate more social and news attention than equally rigorous work in less publicly visible fields, which limits fair comparison across disciplines.
- The score is a private company’s proprietary calculation. Because the exact weighting formula is not fully public and can change over time, the score is best treated as a directional indicator rather than a precise, stable measurement.
- It can be over-weighted in evaluation. Using altmetric scores as a proxy for the importance or rigor of an individual researcher’s work, particularly in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions, is widely cautioned against by the same organizations that produce and promote these metrics.
How Journals and Authors Can Use Altmetrics Meaningfully
Altmetrics are most useful as a complement to, not a substitute for, traditional measures of research impact and quality:
- Track early reach, not final judgment. Use altmetric activity to see which published articles are resonating with a broader audience soon after publication, as a signal for follow-up outreach (press releases, plain-language summaries, social promotion) rather than as a verdict on quality.
- Feed editorial and communications strategy. Journals can use aggregate altmetric patterns to understand which topics, formats, or article types generate public engagement, informing what to promote and how.
- Support — never substitute for — qualitative narratives in evaluation. Funders and institutions that ask for evidence of “impact beyond academia” increasingly accept altmetric evidence (policy citations, media coverage) as one input into a case that should still be built primarily on the substance of the research itself.
- Read the composition, not just the number. A high score driven mostly by policy-document citations tells a very different story than the same score driven mostly by social media chatter; look at what is actually behind the number before drawing conclusions.
- Combine with citation data over time. Because altmetrics arrive early and citations arrive late, tracking both together over the life of an article gives a more complete picture than either snapshot alone.
Altmetrics are a genuinely useful addition to how modern journals and researchers think about impact, provided they are treated as one lens among several rather than a replacement for peer review, citation analysis, or independent judgment about the quality of the underlying work.
