Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A paper's Altmetric Attention Score aggregating news coverage, X mentions and policy citations in the weeks after publication, before formal citations have had time to accumulate.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A paper's per-article citation count pulled from Scopus is an article-level metric but not an altmetric, since it is citation-based rather than a non-traditional attention signal.
Editorial commentary
Altmetrics (“alternative metrics”) are non-citation attention signals — social-media mentions, mainstream and blog coverage, policy-document citations, reference-manager saves — used to evidence engagement with research that citation counts alone do not capture, particularly in the period immediately after publication, before citations have had time to accumulate. The term was coined in the 2010 “altmetrics manifesto” by Priem, Taraborelli, Groth and Neylon.
Altmetrics versus article-level metrics
The two terms are frequently, and incorrectly, used interchangeably. Article-level metrics (ALMs) is the broader category, defined by unit of aggregation: any metric reported per article rather than per journal, including citation counts. Altmetrics is narrower and defined by signal type: specifically the non-traditional, non-citation attention signals. Every altmetric is typically reported at article level, but not every article-level metric is an altmetric — a per-article citation count is an ALM but not an altmetric.
Coverage has degraded, not just rebranded
A material change affects the largest altmetrics provider’s social-media coverage specifically: X (formerly Twitter) retired its Gnip enterprise data product on 30 June 2024, and Altmetric.com migrated its X-tracking to X’s own API v2 Filtered Stream. Since 2023, X has restricted free API read access for most uses, meaning paid API tiers are now generally required to hydrate posts at volume — a real cost and coverage change for altmetrics aggregators, not a cosmetic rebrand. See Twitter mentions for the detail. Anyone citing an altmetric attention score in a case study or CV should treat the underlying platform-coverage assumptions as time-sensitive, not fixed.
Methodological cautions
Altmetric signals can be gamed, are platform-dependent, reflect attention rather than quality, and have coverage that is uneven across disciplines, languages and geographies (a paper with strong public-health relevance may accumulate far more social attention than a mathematics paper of equivalent scholarly significance). Used responsibly — as one input into a narrative case study rather than a standalone score — altmetrics complement citation-based evidence; DORA and CoARA both caution against treating any single quantitative signal, altmetric or citation-based, as sufficient on its own.
References
- Priem J, Taraborelli D, Groth P, Neylon C, “Altmetrics: a manifesto”, 2010 (altmetrics.org). Sugimoto C et al., “Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics”, JASIST, 2017.
Also known as
Alternative metrics · Article-level attention metrics
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Altmetrics"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/altmetrics" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/altmetrics",
"name": "Altmetrics",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/altmetrics",
"description": "A non-citation attention signal -- social-media mention, media coverage, policy citation, or reference-manager save -- used as one input alongside citation-based evidence, not a synonym for article-level metrics generally.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/responsible-assessment#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/altmetrics",
"sameAs": [
"Alternative metrics",
"Article-level attention metrics"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:22:55",
"dateModified": "2026-08-23T05:13:29",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
