With research impact the Holy Grail for many researchers, the notion that one's work could be widely read and carefully saved yet be rarely cited is probably heartbreaking news.

Yet this is the case for many of the 24,331 Public Library of Science articles examined in a recent study outlined in this paper Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact by Jason Priem, Heather A. Piwowar, Bradley M. Hemminger. The article was posted to arXiv on 20 March 2012.

As the abstract states:

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics.

Articles in the sample popped up on Wikipedia and Mendeley as well as appearing in more traditional citation sources like Web of Science.

The authors' findings demonstrate "that there is no shortage of data from altmetrics sources, although different indicators vary greatly in activity."

They also conclude that "altmetrics and citations track forms of impact that are distinct, but related; neither approach is able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone".