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Education Library: Academic & Professional Uses of Social Media: Altmetrics

Journal Impact Factors & Altmetrics

Altmetrics (available to University Staff & Students) can help researchers understand how their outputs are being shared and discussed via social media and online. Altmetrics can be a useful tool to explore the conversations surrounding recent research and to identify recent papers your peers think are interesting.

The score rises the more the article is mentioned, however each category of mention contributes a different base amount to the final score.

Other sites showing journal impact factors include:

Thomson Reuters - Journal Citation Reports Available to Cambridge University Staff and Students with a RAVEN password
http://www.eigenfactor.org/index.php

!! Treat Altmetrics and impact factors with caution - there are some key education journals that don't have them (Assessment in Education; Education 3-13; Emotional & Behavioral Difficulties for example).  Additionally, articles are sometimes cited numerous times because they are a particularly bad example of research and so a high impact factor isn't always a good thing!

There is a general blog about Impact Factors, written in 2012 by LSE
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/06/08/demise-impact-factor-relationship-citation-1970s/ 

Social media & statistics

Most social media platforms have their own in-house analytical tools to show the reach and impact of your posts and tweets.

Facebook: Insights

There is a distinction between a personal profile and a business page (Insights are only available on public Facebook pages rather than personal profiles and then only after at least 30 people have liked a page)

Click on the insights tab on the toolbar

Twitter: Analytics (available on all Twitter accounts)

https://analytics.twitter.com

YouTube: Analytics (Available on all YouTube accounts)

www.youtube.com/analytics

Further reading:

Stuart, D. (2014). Evaluating social media impact. In Web metrics for library and information professionals (pp. 87–113). London: Facet.

Copy available at the Faculty of Education Library here  

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