With the extraordinary growth of the use of social media like Twitter and Facebook, it’s becoming more and more important for researchers to discover how to use it to publicise their work and also to assess the impact that published articles are having across the internet.  Here’s an interesting article entitled How to cite a Tweet and other social media in a medical journal which includes a social media citation guide.

Alternative metrics are now really taking off in the academic publishing world (read this editorial for more information on altmetrics) as the impact factor is not able to fully reflect the influence that individual articles and journals are exerting across the whole of the web.  Citations of social media don’t yet hold the same importance that traditional journal citations do, but they are still an important part of the paper writing process.