Altmetric Blog

What kinds of research did people talk about in May?  While the field of stem cell biology saw a blockbuster paper appear this month, what really took centre stage was the scholarly publication, including its life cycle from peer review to post-publication assessment. Here is another Interactions monthly wrap-up featuring a selection of 5 new and popular articles in the Altmetric database. Data are accurate as of 29 May 2013.     [altmetric doi=”10.1017/S0140525X00011183″ float=”right”] 1. “Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again” Published in June 1982 in Behavioral and Brain Sciences This … Read More

New altmetrics reading material Mike Taylor has written an article in Research Trends entitled “The Challenges of Measuring Social Impact Using Altmetrics”, which is a comprehensive overview of altmetrics today. Also, David Gibson, the executive editor of the Journal of Ecology, has written a short post about article level metrics and how to access them through Readcube, which uses Altmetric data. Previously, David Gibson and his colleagues had written this great blog post about the uptake of Journal of Ecology papers using Altmetric data obtained using rAltmetric.   New badge and donut embeds Making … Read More

Most of the time, this Interactions series on the blog highlights the top of the attention rankings: the papers that went viral, the papers that were popular in a given month, etc. For this week’s Interactions, I decided to profile the altmetrics of 3 interesting papers from journals published by Wiley. (Earlier this week, there was an announcement from Wiley saying that they had begun a trial of article level metrics. Check out our news update for more information.) While the papers I picked weren’t necessarily the highest scoring ones in their respective journals, they each … Read More

Updates from Altmetric It’s been a hugely exciting couple of weeks for all of us at Altmetric. First of all, we’re delighted that John Wiley & Sons, Inc. will be running a trial of Altmetric for 6 months on a number of their journals. Authors and readers can now view Altmetric badges directly on Wiley journal articles (for example, this one), and then click through to article details pages (like this one). On the article details pages for the different journals undergoing the Altmetric trial, Wiley have provided links to surveys on article level metrics … Read More

Our #AltmetricDonut mascot naming contest has now ended. Meet our new mascot, President Icinghower! The name (which is befitting of this great leader of the Altmetric donuts) was suggested by Nathan W. of London, who will soon be receiving a mini version of Icinghower. Congratulations! President Icinghower has started tweeting from his new Twitter account, so do follow him as he explores the world of altmetrics. Thanks so much to everyone who contributed a name and then voted in our poll! … Read More

Médecins Sans Frontières Scientific Day As a charitable organisation that contributes to research, how do you measure the impact of your publications? Being able to track societal and academic impact has been particularly important for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a humanitarian aid organisation that provides medical care during international emergencies, conflicts, and disasters. Each year, MSF staff publish findings in peer-reviewed journals, and the scholarly papers are then deposited in the open-access MSF Field Research repository. Since MSF research has the potential to influence domains such as policy, clinical practice, and humanitarian advocacy, it’s necessary for the … Read More

Attention WordPress bloggers! Our developer Will has just created an awesome and free Altmetric WordPress plugin that allows you to insert Altmetric donuts and badges into any blog post. Now you can easily insert a colourful donut into your text, just as it’s done on the Interactions posts of the Altmetric blog. For example, the WordPress plugin was recently used to display donuts in the April High Five.   Step 1: Manually install the plugin (.zip) into WordPress. It’s extremely simple to get started. First, download the Altmetric WordPress … Read More

Our mascot… who will soon no longer be nameless! Last week, we asked you to help us name our new mascot by tweeting suggestions with #AltmetricDonut or e-mailing them in. We were delighted to receive 32 names in total. They were puns on “Altmetric”, donut puns, and a mix of male (62.5%) and female (37.5%) names. The entries came flying in fast! Today we narrowed the entries down to our favourite 4. (Unfortunately, we decided to disqualify “Aldo” seeing as it’s the name of one of our … Read More

A while ago, I wrote about the ways that people use Twitter to share scholarly articles but one thing we didn’t cover is the use of hashtags. Most tweets are sent to share the paper that is mentioned, and so it follows that most hashtags describe a personal reaction or highlight a notable aspect of the paper. However, a question from James Hardcastle inspired us at Altmetric to look into the use of one particular hashtag – #icanhazpdf (or “I Can Haz PDF”). This hashtag indicates the someone is requesting, rather than sharing, … Read More

Over the weekend, we introduced a new, lovingly-handcrafted team member: this adorable little Altmetric donut. He or she still needs a name though, so we’re putting out a call to the public to help us out. Send us your name suggestions via Twitter (tweet @altmetric with the hashtag #AltmetricDonut) and e-mail (donut@altmetric.com). We’ll pick out our favourites soon, then set up a public poll so you can vote for the best name. The person who submits the winning name will win a mini version of the mascot! … Read More