Introduction

To understand the significance of altmetrics tools and the motivations of their users it is useful for librarians and other information professionals to understand the historical context and primary drivers leading up to the Altmetrics Manifesto.

The Altmetrics Manifesto was published in October 2010 and written by Jason Priem, Dario Taraborelli, Paul Groth and Cameron Neylon. It is described later in this chapter. However, in brief, it drew on earlier work by all four authors and others to suggest that ‘the rapid evolution of scholarly communication, the speed, richness, and breadth of altmetrics make them worth investing in’, asserting that ‘scholarship's […] main filters for importance are failing’ and calling for more tools and research into the area.

Around this document the fledgling field of altmetrics coalesced in a remarkably short space of time, driven by a combination of academic research, practical application and increased funding from a variety of sources.

Altmetrics takes at least two ‘alternative’ (to traditional, citation-based metrics) approaches: widening the definition of research outputs to include more than just books and journal articles, and looking beyond citations for a quantitative way of assessing or discovering them.

One measure of rapid development since the manifesto was published is the number of journals that have adopted some form of altmetrics display for authors or readers – by mid-2015 this was around 6500 (from internal Altmetric.com data via personal communication), including well-known titles like Nature, Cell, PLOS ONE, Science and the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Another measure may be the number of research articles with a title matching ‘altmetrics’ found on Google Scholar – more than 300 since the manifesto was first published.

In parallel to these academic research efforts, altmetrics tools have been developed by both commercial companies like Altmetric.com and Elsevier and not-for-profits like the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Impactstory. As these tools improve and become more useful they drive more interest in the field and become more popular, spreading the ideas and concepts behind the manifesto to wider audiences. At my company, Altmetric.com, the altmetrics data we provide is shown on some 6000 academic journals from 60 different publishers.