Tracking the uptake of primary articles in the scientific literature via the social media is now widely accepted as a valid measure of the value of our work. In an earlier blog post we presented some data on article level metrics (ALMs: altmetrics) of Journal of Ecology articles from 2012. We are pleased that readers can now directly access ALMs via ReadCube for articles published in the British Ecological Society journals, including Journal of Ecology.

To see ALMs when accessing a Journal of Ecology article on Wiley Online Library, click on ‘Get PDF’, choose ‘Enhanced PDF’, and then click on the circular blue icon under the ‘ALTMETRIC’ link on the left hand side of the enhanced PDF. For example, you can see below that Sutherland et al.’s 2013 paper ‘Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions’ has currently been mentioned by 96 tweeters, 4 Facebook users, and in two science blogs giving it an altmetric score of 85 at the time of writing this blog post.  Clicking on the score brings up a new screen that provides links to the tweets, facebook pages, and blogs, along with demographics showing where the altmetrics are coming from geographically, and mentioning that this article has scored higher than 99% of 64,870 tracked articles published within a 6 week window either side of this one in any journal. Wow! This paper came out in the first issue of the Journal in 2013 but we know already that it is attracting a lot of attention, way ahead of any traditional citations (6 so far) that will take months to accumulate.

Our publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, is also running a six-month trial across a number of journals, including our sister journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, in which ALMs are directly accessible from the article page (see their blog post about this here). For example, Pouzol and Moilanen’s article ‘RobOff: software for analysis of alternative land-use options and conservation actions’ that was first published online on 14 March already has an altmetric score of 14 having been tweeted 10 times, mentioned on Facebook and blogged about once, and picked up by 7 Mendeley readers.

We encourage readers to take advantage of the availability of ALMs to track uptake of both their own articles and those that they have personally found useful and informative.

David Gibson

Executive Editor, Journal of Ecology