Resource of the Week #108: A Resource on Measuring Articles’ Impacts

Hello again. Last week AuthorAID colleague Julie Walker mentioned a new resource. This resource is about ways to measure the impact of individual journal articles. In other words, it is about article-level metrics (ALMs).

ALMs help show how, and how much, individual journal articles are being used. Including them provides a more complete picture than relying only on impact factor, which indicates the average number of citations of recent articles in an entire journal.

The resource is titled Article-Level Metrics: A SPARC Primer. It is from SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

Part of this resource lists categories of ALMs:

• Usage (for example, how many times an article has been viewed or downloaded)
• Captures (for example, how often an article has been bookmarked on CiteULike or shared in Mendeley)
• Mentions (for example, how many times an article has been blogged about, written about in news stories, mentioned in Wikipedia, or commented on)
• Social Media (for example, number of Facebook likes)
• Citations (how many articles, and which ones, cite the article)

This resource also includes many other useful items. I wonder whether this blog post will contribute to its metrics.

Until the next post—

Barbara