Alternative metrics say something about the use of your work outside academia. Read more about alternative metrics, Altmetric and potential issues in Module 2. Tools:

Altmetric tracks mentions of a publication in social media, news outlets, policy papers, blogs, patents, Wikipedia and more. With the free tools you can only search for one publication at once (see more in the blue box below).
Sage Policy Profiles only covers policy, but you can get a free account which gives you a nice overview for all of your works, and even a public profile if you wish. View an example of a public Sage Policy Profile here.

Coverage: These tools are best at covering articles, but may also cover some books/chapters if they have dois. Coverage of Norwegian sources is increasing in Altmetric, with sources such as government documents (Regjeringen) and NRK covered. However, it is not perfect - we therefore recommend that you keep a manual record if you know that your work has been used in a source of importance.

Tip: In health/medicine, and want to see if your work is cited by Helsedirektoratet, in clinical guidelines, etc? In addition to Altmetric, you can also try Googling your name or part of your article title in quotes, limiting your search to the site of interest, e.g.: "Nordmann O" site:www.helsedirektoratet.no/retningslinjer/ ; alternatively, test out our custom google search which searches across several agencies all at once (Helsedirektoratet, Helsetilsynet, Forebygging.no etc.) - search for your article title or name (e.g. "Nordmann O").

How to: The video below shows how to find Altmetric data for your publications using the free Altmetric Bookmarklet tool (get it at this link). When reporting results, we recommend picking the aspects that are most relevant for you (e.g. number of news articles), rather than the total score which is difficult to interpret. If you only want where your work has been used in policy, you can get a Sage Policy Profiles. Tip: see also Altmetric blog post on tips for incorporating Altmetric stats into an impact statement.

You can only access data one publication at a time using Altmetric free tools. If you need data for a large set of publications, for example your whole career, or for the outputs of a project with multiple authors, we can provide this at the library. Please get in touch with us at bibliometri@uib.no, providing us with either a) a list of the DOIs/ISBNs/PubMed IDs/arXiv IDs for the publications you want data for, or b) updated ORCID profile IDs with the publications of interest.