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Article metrics

What are article metrics?
Article metrics provide information on the usage and dissemination of published articles.
Examples include:

  • article accesses
  • citations
  • bookmarking/rating/discussion via bibliographic tools/sites, such as Papers
  • social media sharing, such as Facebook and Twitter

Article metrics are provided for all articles published by SpringerOpen and BioMed Central to help readers assess the importance and impact of these articles.

What article metrics do SpringerOpen and BioMed Central provide?
The following metrics are currently available:

  • Access counts - The number of times an article has been accessed on SpringerOpen or BioMed Central and SpringerLink
  • Citation counts - Our citations database is updated in real time. New citations are added as soon as they become available in the Crossref database. More information.
  • Altmetric.com - Altmetric.com tracks the discussion and dissemination of articles following their publication. It aggregates the mentions on social media sites as well as coverage in online reference managers, mainstream news sources and blogs to present an overview of the interest a published article is receiving online. More information.

How do SpringerOpen and BioMed Central ensure that article metrics are reliable?
We monitor and filter article access data to remove 'suspicious' accesses that may distort access statistics.