“The ‘citation’ has long served as the bedrock out of which the scientific impact of a published work is carved. This, too, is the basis of common metrics such as the impact factor (IF) and h-index. However, these traditional metrics have been criticized over time for being opaque, difficult to compare across fields, easily manipulatable and ultimately confined to assessing impact within academic circles (rather than educational, or in the general public).1 To confuse matters further, different article databases often report different citation counts for papers depending on their level of coverage.2 For scientists, the ‘publish or perish’ attitude in contemporary science has also led to a fundamental shift in behaviour to emphasize increased output. This includes, for example, splitting papers into multiple, smaller publications. Given the rate of scientific output has doubled approximately every 9 years, it has become increasingly difficult to know exactly what is worth paying attention to in the scientific milieu. Similarly, the considerable time for citations to accumulate hinders an immediate assessment of a work’s impact. These factors are among those which provided the impetus behind the development of Altmetrics: an alternative metric capitalizing on the advent of the internet and social media, where over a third of scholars are on Twitter, to allow a glimpse into a scientific work’s reach at an earlier stage than citations would typically allow.3
Altmetric Attention Scores (AAS) are largely qualitative scores calculated based on weighted variables associated with an article, such as the number of referencing blog posts and Wikipedia articles, Twitter mentions and peer-reviews on Faculty of 1000.4 The different score weightings applied to each variable ostensibly reflects their relative social reach, with news posts and Twitter mentions contributing 8 and 1 points towards the overall AAS, respectively. It gets slightly more complex with Twitter, where scores are applied based on the nature of the Tweeter: a publisher’s account should be valued less than an unconnected individual’s account with a sizeable following. Fundamental to the use of AAS is that they are indicators of attention rather than quality. For this reason, Altmetrics can be seen as complimentary to traditional bibliometrics. Where the score is particularly useful is in helping to discover papers, evaluate scientific impact in a broader context and as a tool for examining trends in disciplines over time….”