"Alternative metrics, sometimes shortened to just altmetrics, is an umbrella term covering new ways of approaching, measuring and provideing evidence for impact."    ——Euan Adie

Alternative to what (替代什么）？

   替代计量中的“替代”部分，意指替代研究计量的传统视角，即仅使用引文来测度影响力。

   但是这并不是说，要完全代替基于引文的计量指标。

Uptake of Altmetrics（替代计量的采用）

   Publishers and institutions have been quick to take to altme-trics of various forms, and many journal platforms support the provision of altmetrics in some form as standard; altme-tric.com alone serves some 4M requests for data a day, and some publishers like PLoS successfully run in-house altme-trics collection programmes.

   Interestingly one of the primary drivers of usage of altmetrics is authors looking at their own work, rather than other people’s. This makes sense: if you published a paper tomorrow, would you interested in who else might read or discuss it? Would you want to have some indication of whether or not it was getting more or less attention that you might expect?

   Partly this is, for lack of a better word, an ego thing. It’s natural as an author to want to know who has seen your work, who is reading it properly, commenting on it, citing it. In this context, however, egotism isn’t a negative character trait. Rather it’s something that you need to have developed to be a successful researcher –grants don’t go to people who can’t demonstrate that they’ve had any influence in their field.

   Practically speaking this means that the majority of acade-mic publishers using altmetrics do so as an author service, linking to altmetrics data reports from each article.

   Using the data for discovery is less popular amongst publis-hers, perhaps because of the more complicated integrations required for their platforms. That said several successful pilots have been run by Elsevier (showing articles that have been ta-lked about recently on journal homepages) and others.

   Altmetrics are also used in other areas: by institutions as an awareness tool, for research admin or for reputation mana-gement; by funders, looking for evidence to help show that grant funded research outputs are giving value for money and by mainstream media to pick up interesting stories be-fore they’ve been picked up in other media outlets.

Challenges（替代计量面临的挑战）

   Before altmetrics can truly be considered mainstream there are several challenges to overcome.

   One is simply a common understanding of exactly what altmetrics are and how they should be used: the price of rapid progress in the field has been some confusion over exactly what is being claimed; about what’s hope and what’s hype and what circumstances the data is to be used in.

   Another is to get stakeholder communities involved in the further development of altmetrics tools and best practice. Up until now altmetrics has been driven by the people working in that field (and coming, generally, from academic re-search  or  publishing  backgrounds).  If  altmetrics  are  to  be truly useful to, for example, a small biomedical funder then we  need  small  biomedical  funders  to  be  speaking  up  and talking about what the data they need is.

   Finally, data availability and reliability is critical. Citations have the benefit of being for the most part stable, captured in the scholarly record and clearly recorded, at least since the advent of CrossRef, Scopus and Web of science. The nature of altmetrics data is that it is much more transient and difficult to capture, at least in a way that allows for clear auditing and tracking data back to the source.

   截选自Taking the alternative mainstream，里面也有涉及替代计量内涵的探讨，包括替代计量的快速发展造成的一些困扰。