In present modern world, there are number of conversations, academic discussions and scholarly activities happen online each day. Popularly in scholarly and scientific publishing fraternity, Altmetrics is playing an important role to know shift from non-traditional metrics proposed as an alternative to more traditional citation impact metrics, namely impact factor and h-index. The purpose of present research article is to assess the research impact of Thapar University through Non-Traditional Metrics (known as Altmetrics). The Content analysis is carried out through publication of Thapar University obtained from the SCOPUS database. The data was analysed for assessing research impact through Altmetrics. However, Network analysis, data sharing properties reflected on social networking websites and other bibliographic management tools have been carried out. The analysis of the Thapar University publication over a period has given a positive impact over time.
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Through advancement in web technology, social media and digital marketing platforms have created a platform; whereby academic scholars are positively using and sharing their research work. Sometime, these activities on social media may not be related to their research but has an indirect relevance and impact on research (Bar-Illan 2012). The sharing of research on social web, discussion through blog, comments through social networking website have an indirect impact on the article, now emerged as a new tool of impact assessment. This unique method of assessment is now popularly known as 'Altmetrics'. Altmetric measurements are derived from the social web, which are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and its usefulness. Originally, Altmetrics was founded in January 2011 that identifies, tracks, and collects article-level metrics on behalf of publishers. It is a quantitative or qualitative indicators measure of the impact that a single article has had (Adie and Roe 2013).
Galligan (2012) in his review study reported that the “Altmetrics are new measurements for the impact of scholarly content, based on how far and wide it travels through the social Web (like Twitter), social bookmarking (e.g. CiteULike) and collaboration tools (such as Mendeley)”. The argument appeared as ‘altmetrics hope to do is provide an alternative measure of impact, distinct from the Journal Impact Factor, which has been categorically misused and is unable to respond to the digital environment that scholarship takes place in today.”
Further, there has been conceptual lacking about the systematic scientific evidence, which can strongly prove the importance of Altmetrics as a supplement of journal impact factor. Based on certain case study, an advocacy about the importance of altmetrics and its impact is being generalized (Thelwal et al. 2013; Neylon & Wu 2009; Eysenbach 2011).
Galligan and Dyas-Correia (2013) reviewed a different tool which helps in measuring the impact of the articles with non traditional methods other than citation analysis. These tools are Plum Analytics (http://www.plumanalytics.com/about.html) which collects the data via open application programming interfaces (APIs) from various sources including Blogs, Twitter, Open Access Repositories that publishes Article Level Metrics, Data Repositories, Code Source Repositories, Social Bookmarking Sites, and presentation sharing sites (Kelley, 2012).
Another tool known to work on simililar ground like plumanalytics is CitedInWeb site (http://www.papercritic.com/about) based on Mendeley API, enables researchers to monitor all types of feedback about theirwork and also enables everyone to evaluate the work of others.