Altmetrics - A Collated Adjunct Beyond Citations for Scholarly Impact: A Systematic Review

In emerging Figures, scholars are unifying social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, open nature of these tools reveals the scholarly action to be clear and unambiguous. Metrics which is set on these activities could enlighten broader, faster measures of impact, supplementing traditional citation metrics.

The present review aims to analyse the correlation of altmetrics with the traditional citations in medical research.

The search strategy used a combination of controlled vocabulary and free text terms. The main database searched were PubMed, PubMed Central, Cochrane Review, Embase and Google Scholar from 2010 to 2016. Out of the total 78 titles appeared seven articles fulfilled the criteria and were selected for the review.

The positive correlation between altmetrics and traditional citations indicates that the two are not entirely different from each other and are familiar with each other. Altmetrics are usually accessible earlier and enable us to evaluate the social impact of scholarly research, almost at the actual time.

Much work is needed to develop this research which will focus on the clarity of the impact signal. Thus newer dimensions, such as altmetrics and article-level metrics are an effort to explore the influence of research across the worldwide population.