Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A PlumX or Altmetric.com dashboard attached to a single DOI, combining Scopus/Web of Science citation counts, Mendeley readership, and policy-document citations for that one article.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Reporting a journal's five-year Impact Factor next to an article on a CV is a journal-level metric, not an article-level metric, even when placed beside that article's own citation count.
Editorial commentary
Article-level metrics (ALMs) are impact and attention indicators reported at the level of an individual article rather than aggregated to the journal it appeared in. The term was popularised by PLOS from 2009 as a deliberate counter to journal-level reasoning: because citation and attention outcomes vary widely between articles in the same journal, a journal-level proxy such as the Journal Impact Factor tells you almost nothing reliable about any one paper.
What a typical ALM dashboard includes
ALMs are a broad category defined by their unit of aggregation (the article), not by any one signal type. A typical dashboard combines citation counts from multiple databases, full-text views and PDF downloads, reference-manager saves (e.g. Mendeley readership), policy-document citations, and social and mainstream-media mentions. That last category — non-citation, “alternative” attention signals — is what the separate term altmetrics specifically names; altmetrics are one input into an ALM dashboard, not a synonym for it. A dashboard reporting only citation counts, split per article rather than averaged per journal, is still an ALM even with zero altmetric signals in it.
Why this matters for assessment
DORA’s first, and most cited, recommendation is to “eliminate the use of journal-based metrics… as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles” and move toward article-level evidence instead — which is precisely what ALMs operationalise. CoARA’s Agreement makes the same move from a different institutional-commitment angle. Neither DORA nor CoARA endorses a specific ALM provider or dashboard; both are agnostic about which article-level signals an institution chooses, so long as journal-level proxies are not substituted for them.
Providers
PLOS’s own ALM system was an early reference implementation; PlumX Metrics (Elsevier) and Altmetric.com now provide the most widely used third-party ALM dashboards, alongside citation counts drawn from Web of Science, Scopus, or Crossref.
References
- PLOS Article-Level Metrics documentation. Lin J, Fenner M, “Altmetrics in evolution”, Information Standards Quarterly, 2013. DORA, sfdora.org.
Also known as
ALMs · Article-level indicators
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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