Measuring research impact: bibliometrics, social media, altmetrics, and the BJGP

Social media platforms such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and article reference managers such as Mendeley are now being used to communicate and discuss research. Alternative metrics (‘altmetrics’), first described by Priem and colleagues,1 is a term used to describe ‘web-based metrics for the impact of scholarly material with an emphasis on social media outlets as a source of data’.2 These article-level metrics are increasingly being used in...