‘Altmetrics’! Can you afford to ignore it?

Altmetrics is a metric that quantifies the ‘attention’ an article receives amongst a multitude of online sources, including social media, mainstream news, and blogs. A score primarily consists of the number of views, discussions on social and mass media, citations, as well as any ‘saving’ in citation managers, among other inputs. An algorithm subsequently produces a weighted score that corresponds to the real-time ‘reach’ and attention that an article is receiving. A ‘donut’ is produced that represents this, with individual colours representing different platforms, providing a visual representation of an article’s dissemination. This editorial illustrates the highest scoring top ten papers from the British Journal of Sports Medicine and recommends wider useage of almetric scoring.