Impact Story is one of the two altmetrics tools that allow individual researchers to find out something about the social media buzz surrounding their activities; the other is Altmetric.com. Although other developers exist, I can’t seem to figure out how I, as an individual, can use their tools (I’m looking at you, Plum Analytics).

There are a few major differences between Impact Story and Altmetric.com from a user standpoint. First, Impact Story is not for profit, while Altmetric.com is a business. Second, Impact Story steers one to create a collection of products that together tell a story of one’s impact. Altmetric.com, on the other hand, steers one to generate figures for the impact of individual products. Third, Impact Story allows for a range of products, including those tagged with URLs as well as DOIs; Altmetric.com only works with DOIs. This means that Impact Story can gather info on things like blog posts, while Altmetric.com is focused on scholarly articles. Finally, and this is a big difference, Impact Story deemphasizes numbers, while Atlmetric.com assigns a number, the Altmetric score, to each product.

Here is my latest Impact Story.

Here is one of my products according to Altmetric; here’s another; and another.

It’s interesting to see how Impact Story and Altmetric differ, both in their approaches and in terms of what they find on the same products.

I think the implications of these tools are enormous. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts!