Research impact: Altmetrics make their mark

Alternative measures can yield useful data on achievement — but must be used cautiously.

Steve Pettifer and his colleagues did not heavily promote their 2008 paper on digital library tools. So it came as a surprise when, in August 2012, Pettifer got an e-mail from the Public Library of Science (PLOS), based in San Francisco, California. A PLOS representative told him that people had viewed or downloaded the article (D. Hull et al. PLoS Comput. Biol. 4, e1000204; 2008) more than 53,000 times. It was the most-accessed review ever to be published in any of the seven PLOS journals. The paper had come out just as biologists' interest in digital publishing was building and the number of tools was exploding, says Pettifer, a computer scientist at the University of Manchester, UK. “It hit the right note at the right time,” he says