On Monday, October 14, I was happy to be part of a panel at the World Social Science Forum in Montreal. The panel was put together and moderated by Gregg Gordon from SSRN, and my presentation was entitled, “Altmetrics in Practice.” The audience was especially interested in measuring research output beyond articles—and books in particular.

Among the growing list of metrics on the PlumX platform include 2 especially exciting metrics for books:

• Improved Wikipedia coverage – We track Wikipedia mentions of both DOIs and ISBNs as a type of a “mention” in PlumX.  We’ve recently improved our algorithms to pull back a fuller set of mentions in the English language version of Wikipedia.  Within PlumX, you can click through to see the actual Wikipedia articles that are behind the counts.
• Amazon book reviews – For many disciplines, books are a key component of measuring the impact of research.  We have previously had the count of libraries who hold the book from WorldCat.  Including the count of Amazon book reviews,

For example, The Cambridge dictionary of philosophy had the following metrics:

For all of the details check out the full list of metrics that we track on PlumX.