Altmetrics for Librarians: Pros and Cons. While digital libraries, institutional repositories, journals and databases provide an open opportunity to download scholarly research, “alternative metrics” or altmetrics supply usage statistics, which can be very useful in determining an article’s popularity and its reading potential.[1] “We may be witnessing a tipping point in collaboration, faster access, and new opportunities.”[2] Almetrics allows librarians to provide their users with statistics regarding academic articles more quickly.
Altmetrics can tell us how many times an article, website, software or blog has been viewed, downloaded, reused, shared, and cited.[3] It has been noted that there is correlation between the number of online views and downloads of an article and the number of times that article will be cited in future research.[4] The pros of altmetrics And altmetrics are designed to be easy to use. Altmetric. DataCite. ImpactStory.