Wiley tries out alternative metrics

Wiley has launched a six-month trial of Altmetric, which tracks and measures the impact of scholarly articles and datasets across the web. The trial will run on several of the publisher's subscription and open-access journals, including Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, BJU International, Brain and Behavior, Methods in Ecology and Evolution and EMBO Molecular Medicine.

Altmetric will track social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, blogs, newspapers, magazines and online reference managers like Mendeley and CiteULike for mentions of scholarly articles published in the journals included in the trial. It will then create and display a score for each article to indicate the quality and quantity of attention that the particular article has received.

'We’re pleased to be working with Altmetric,' said Rachel Burley, vice president and director, open access at Wiley. 'The pilot will allow us to understand the value of alternative metrics to our authors and users and how those metrics are used.'