Supplementing Traditional Ways of Measuring Scholarly Impact: The Altmetrics Way

The paper explores the importance of the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) and York researchers’ awareness and perceptions of scholarly metrics and their impact. The top 100 papers with high Altmetric Attention Scores from York University were downloaded using Altmeric Explorer. These articles were further sorted by year of publication, subject areas, and the journals they were published in. Faculty members across disciplines were informed about their AAS along with the Google Scholar citations to the same article. They were requested to complete an online survey. Faculty members were interested in knowing more about the News media coverage and the Altmetric Attention Scores for their other articles. They also wanted to know the applicability of these altmetrics to their research. Much work needs to be done by the administration and librarians to explain the importance of altmetrics in different fields and how they can support and enhance the university and the researcher’s profile.