This paper provides a glimpse of genesis of altmetrics in measuring efficacy of scholarly communications. This paper also highlights available altmetric tools and social platforms linking altmetric tools, which are widely used in deriving altmetric scores of scholarly publications.

While social media is a valuable tool for outreach and the sharing of ideas, there is a danger that this form of communication is gaining too high a value and that we are losing sight of key metrics of scientific value, such as citation indices.

Earlier this year, at a symposium organized by Nature in Melbourne, Australia, a group of leading academics, funders and government advisers discussed how research outcomes are measured. This Nature Outlook was influenced by these debates.

This document is the annual work programme for the European Research Council funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.

It is known that statistically significant results are more likely to be published than results that are not statistically significant. We conducted a search in the abstracts of papers published between 1990 and 2014. The results indicate that negative results are not disappearing, but have actually become 4.3 times more prevalent since 1990. Positive results, on the other hand, have become 13.9 times more prevalent since 1990.

Open access science articles are read and cited more often than articles available only to subscribers, a study has suggested.

The 1st Altmetrics Conference: London, 25.-26.9.2014