Citations are a lagging indicator, but conversations start on day 1. Only alternative metrics can tell Medical Affairs teams if research is landing in real-time.
In the age of AI, research intelligence has to begin with trusted data. This series, Inside Our Data, explores the foundational data infrastructure that makes trust possible.
Medical Affairs teams are increasingly under pressure to act on emerging evidence and consistently demonstrate value to stakeholders, but this is impossible with citations alone. Citations can take years to manifest and capture only one aspect of a publication’s impact: its resonance in the world of academia.
To capture a holistic view of a publication’s performance and find new opportunities in publication strategy, teams have to integrate alternative metrics, often called altmetrics, to understand where research is gaining influence today. Altmetrics encompasses broader, more horizontal signals that bubble up across analog and digital third spaces, such as policy documents, social media, broadcast media and other peer-to-peer communication forums. When it comes to capturing a robust picture of a publication’s influence in real time, there’s no substitute. Unlike citations, altmetrics can help teams find direction and set measurable goals from the beginning of the publication cycle.
That teams are expected to do a lot with a little isn’t new. What has changed in recent years is that budget holders increasingly understand citation-based metrics alone aren’t enough. Leadership teams have come to recognize that the conversation about research is now happening in more places, and on a faster timeline, and there’s no reason to think this trend will slow or reverse.
That means now is the time for teams to work out their altmetrics set-up so they’re best placed to capitalize on relevant community activity, maximize a publication’s impact, and demonstrate that value upwards.
Tracking real-world impact with altmetrics
In the last few decades, advances in technology have made it much easier to share, converse about, and learn from research emerging all over the world. As journals moved online, so too did Life Sciences communities; Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and Healthcare Practitioners (HCPs) alike found community and conversation that helped them learn about new research and potentially inform their therapeutic behavior.
At the same time, the definition of KOL got wider. Beyond the traditional clinician-researcher, a distinct category of communication specialists has developed in recent years. These might be clinicians who focus on translating and communicating research rather than producing it, for example. Patient advocates have taken on a similar role, particularly in oncology, where major congresses now build in dedicated spaces for patient participation. In rare disease areas, that role often falls to parents of patients, who can become de facto experts in fields where the total body of published research may only amount to a handful of papers a year.
Knowing who is saying what about research provides invaluable insights which are critical for maximizing both the academic and real-life impact of a publication, and citation data alone is incapable of capturing the volume or nature of that community and conversation. But identifying and tracking these different populations is an ongoing process, and it varies by therapeutic area—teams need to know both who they’re looking for and what they’re looking for. To date, this was a task too complex and time-consuming to perform reliably, and this meaningfully hindered how Medical Affairs teams were able to perform.
This is what led Digital Science to invest in Altmetric, a platform which uses academic, non-academic, governmental, and professional sources to build a more complete picture of research impact. Its technology tracks, collates, and disambiguates shares and mentions of articles, books, reports, grey literature, and more, making it possible to track specific KOLs and analyze sentiment within specific communities. Data on researchers—job function, professional expertise, social media activity, location, career history—is blended with social and attention data to build a fuller picture of a given KOL, including how and where they’re active outside formal publication. Altmetric continues to expand its scope, having recently added seminars and readership information to its datasets.
The result is a clearer picture of who is reading what research and what they think about it, so teams can tailor publication plans as new opportunities arise.
Alternate timelines: where citations and altmetrics diverge
We know that research can have an extremely long shelf life. In fact, the challenge faced by Medical Affairs teams over the last 20 years—tracking both citations and altmetrics—results at least in part because these two measurements work on vastly different timescales.
Citations can emerge years after publication, but they form a critical part of impact measurement and planning for later publications. Citations are the best way to demonstrate high-level academic impact and they grant legitimacy to the research and the teams who carry it out—whether they’re published a year on or more.
Contrast this with altmetrics, which can emerge from day 1 and can ebb and flow dramatically over the life of a publication—and where each such instance can provide teams the opportunity to capitalize if they can move fast enough. Social media conversation can begin on the day of publication; podcasts often emerge at least a year later, and policy and guidelines citations typically materialize two to three years after publication. Where conversation is ongoing, sentiment can shift through time, creating opportunities for teams to engage with communities and refine strategy. Reliably tracking these instances manually is essentially impossible, but this low-frequency activity is the best way to understand real world impact.
These two measurements capture both sides of the same coin, and teams need both to know exactly how research is performing. But checking for citations weekly might turn up no results for a year or longer. And if a team only checks altmetric monitoring once per week, or overlooks a rising KOL, they could miss a critical flash in the pan.
To solve this problem, Altmetric tracks thousands of online mentions plus clinical guidelines and policy citations across social media, mainstream media, policy, patents and more all in one platform, and Altmetric Explorer centralizes that data so teams can easily and consistently monitor both citation and altmetrics for signals that could help shape strategy. This way, teams can pivot as conversation naturally evolves through time—despite the different timelines such conversation can take to develop.
Measuring real-life impact and demonstrating value with Digital Science
Medical Affairs teams are under immense pressure to act quickly—and to be able to explain their decisions and learnings as they go. They need to understand the real-life impact research is having, and how it is best measured, to make informed decisions.
To make this possible, Altmetric provides:
- 280M+ Altmetric data points within the Dimensions ecosystem
- real-time attention records for individual scholarly outputs
- academic and mainstream source coverage
- clear attention and engagement signals
Altmetric data is continuously refined and curated by Digital Science teams to ensure fit and relevance. Digital Science has existed for nearly 20 years, so its data aggregation and curation processes are time-tested, ensuring the Altmetric data teams have come to rely on is still market-leading in breadth and completeness.
This is how the Altmetric score has taken on industry-wide importance. This score has existed for over a decade, and the interoperability of the dataset has proven value across research areas, making the Altmetric score a reliable, trustworthy indicator of performance. This is useful not only for benchmarking across competitors or research areas, like teams can do with Digital Science’s new platform, Compass, but also to help with upward reporting.
By putting a number on research attention—a single, clear metric to track and compare—teams can easily demonstrate value to stakeholders. This is more specific than broad social listening—which is characterized by fuzz and non-specific noise—and instead captures real, relevant sentiment which ensures teams can actually compare apples to apples with clean, consistent data.
This is important because raw attention numbers can only go so far on their own: oncology and pandemic-era research naturally draw disproportionate attention compared with rare disease research, so that number alone doesn’t tell a team whether their result in another therapeutic area is actually good. Being able to compare a consistent measurement, the Altmetric score, against publications within the same therapeutic class is what makes the number meaningful.
In 2025, Digital Science built sentiment analysis into its ecosystem. Adding sentiment analysis on top provides an unprecedented qualitative layer to this measurement. Teams can measure real-world impact, and how it changes, through time, adjusting activities to better target certain KOLs or communities from day 1. This sentiment tracking is focused on scientific and clinical attitudes that form towards research, and is tied to the specific publication rather than overall brand or company sentiment. This distinguishes it from the broader social listening that pharma companies often run at the brand level.
See where research is gaining influence before citations catch up
Citations take years to materialize and only capture a slice of the impact research has. Stakeholders recognize there’s more to performance measurement than citations, but there hasn’t been a suitable proxy for a holistic view of impact until now.
Altmetrics is the other piece of the puzzle, reflecting the real-world, real-life impacts of a publication in the conversations of KOLs, HCPs and policymakers, and in the lives of patients. To maximize publication performance and demonstrate value to stakeholders, Medical Affairs teams need both.
This is what Digital Science’s data ecosystem is built for: connecting the academic record with real-world attention so that Medical Affairs teams get one continuous view of a publication’s impact. Altmetric captures this influence layer by tracking millions of data points to give teams a real-time view of the conversation surrounding given research, and it’s one part of a wider toolset that Digital Science provides to enrich the entire research lifecycle. This layer provides crucial context for the burgeoning use of agentic AI in Medical Affairs; it also allows teams to make informed use of emerging evidence and act quickly—all with the confidence they’ll be able to explain their decisions and prove their value upwards.
Digital Science provides one of the world’s broadest collections of connected research intelligence—combining Dimensions, Altmetric, and IFI CLAIMS to help enterprise organizations with strategic decision-making, innovation, and AI-enabled workflows with intelligence that can be explained, audited, and defended. Request a demo to learn more about how Digital Science could revolutionize your team’s publication planning.
