A Product of William S. Hein & Co., Inc.
Search
Close this search box.

Beyond Citations: New Altmetric Feature Explores the Social Impact of Scholarly Works

4 MIN READ

In 2008, HeinOnline launched ScholarCheck, our first home-grown citation tool, to provide the most-cited journals, articles, and authors to aid researchers in quickly locating authoritative material in the database. Now, researchers can take an extra step and analyze scholarly content outside of HeinOnline with our integration with Altmetric. Altmetric follows online attention across news outlets, websites, blogs, social media, and more, tracking thousands of online conversations to uncover the societal impact of scholarly works. Watch this short video or keep reading to learn more.

Altmetric in HeinOnline

In HeinOnline, an Altmetric donut badge will only appear if an article includes a Digital Object Identifier, also known as a DOI, and at least 1 metric from an outside online source. The outside sources include:

Altmetric logo

  • Public policy documents
  • Online reference managers
  • Social media (Facebook, X, Google+, etc.)
  • Wikipedia
  • Citations
  • Mainstream media
  • Post-publication peer-review platforms
  • Patents (data from IDI Claims)
  • Academic and non-academic blogs
  • Research highlights
  • Multimedia and other online platforms (YouTube, Reddit, etc.)

These badges are updated daily. So how does this integration work? Selecting the donut badge brings users to the Altmetric Attention Score page for that article. The summary tab contains general information regarding the article. It also contains a visual representation of the location of users from X, formerly known as Twitter, and Mendeley readers who are sharing the output. 

image of an an Altmetric Attention Score Page

The Altmetric Attention Score for a research output indicates the amount of attention it has received.

image of Altmetric Attention Score

How Is the Altmetric Score Calculated?

The Altmetric Attention Score is an automatically calculated, weighted count of all of the attention a research output has received. It is based on 3 main factors:

icon of a chart rising

Volume

The score for an article rises as more people mention it. We only count one mention from each person per source, so if you tweet about the same paper more than once, Altmetric will ignore everything but the first.

icon of a newspaper

Sources

Each category of mention contributes a different base amount to the final score. For example, a newspaper article contributes more than a blog post, which contributes more than a tweet.

icon of authors circulating around a written piece of work

Authors

Altmetric looks at how often the author of each mention talks about scholarly articles, whether or not there’s any bias towards a particular journal or publisher, and who the audience is.

The Altmetric donut colors show you where the conversations are happening. In this example, you can see most of the conversation for this piece is occurring on X, as indicated by the blue color. The colors of the Altmetric donut each represent a different source of attention:

image of the various colors that represent different sources of attention for an Altmetric donut badge

Tab through the various outlets to be directly linked to each reference. 

image of where an article has been mentioned on X as displayed on an Altmetric attention score page

What’s more, researchers can set up email alerts to tell them when an article has been mentioned. This allows researchers and authors to track ongoing attention associated with an article. 

image of the email alert option within an Altmetric Attention Score page under Summary

These badges can be found in four different places in HeinOnline.

1. Search Results

Within a search results page, users will see the Altmetric badge located to the right of the document, next to the ScholarCheck metrics.

image of Altmetric donut badge listed next to ScholarCheck metrics on a HeinOnline search results page

2. Author Profile Pages

The Altmetric badge can be found on Author Profile Pages in HeinOnline. Similar to search results, the donut badge will be listed next to the ScholarCheck metrics of the author’s listed works.

image of Altmetric donut badges found on an author profile page in HeinOnline

3. Viewing an Article

When viewing an article in HeinOnline, an Altmetric badge will display next to the ScholarCheck metrics above the table of contents.

4. MyHein

If a user saves an article that contains an Altmetric badge to their MyHein account, the badge will be displayed there as well.

image of the Altmetric donut badge displayed within MyHein by a bookmarked article

More About Altmetric

Altmetric is part of Digital Science, an AI-focused technology company that tracks where published research is mentioned online. Altmetrics are a simple and effective way of understanding who is engaging with research online and what they’re saying. The Altmetric data gathered allows users to track anything from articles to software packages, using a broad range of scholarly identifiers that cut out the noise of traditional measurement tools.


Need Help? Contact Us.

Our HeinOnline Support team is available to guide you through this new feature or any other questions you may have. Contact us or browse our help resources below.

You Might Also Like
image of a woman on a laptop sitting at a desk
New Features
New Author Profile Feature: Download a Metrics CSV

We are excited to share a new feature that has evolved from countless customer requests. Now you can effortlessly download a CSV of an author’s scholarly works, including their ScholarCheck metrics, straight from author profile pages in HeinOnline.

Like what you see?

There’s plenty more where that came from! Subscribe to the HeinOnline Blog to receive posts like these right to your inbox.

By entering your email, you agree to receive great content from the HeinOnline Blog. HeinOnline also uses the information you provide to contact you about other content, products, and services we think you’ll love.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to the blog!

https://www.traditionrolex.com/24