Altmetric Blog

The score in the middle of the Altmetric donut visualization gives you a quick idea of the level of attention that a paper has received. We get a lot of positive feedback from authors about it – but we also sometimes hear legitimate worries from some editors and institutional repositories that it might make researchers think that they’re being judged. It’s a tricky balancing act: we want to make the data as easy as possible for users to get into and explore, and to help identify articles around which there’s a lot of buzz, without sending the wrong message that … Read More

If you’ve browsed through the Altmetric data recently, you might have noticed a silver stripe in many of our donuts. The new silver stripe represents a brand new source of online academic attention: open peer review platforms. Following from an earlier announcement about our partnership with Publons, we recently launched a new “peer reviews” tab on our article details pages. The peer reviews tab displays attention data that we are receiving from two of the major peer review platforms, Publons and PubPeer. Open peer review platforms … Read More

We’re really pleased to announce that we’re now collecting data from Sina Weibo, and it’ll start appearing in visualisations and on the details pages soon. You may have noticed that on the demographics tab for most articles China doesn’t usually show much attention, even when the paper is by Chinese authors. That’s because Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia are all blocked in mainland China. Chinese researchers do talk about academic papers though, just elsewhere. One of the requests we see most often from publishers is for us track systems like Sina Weibo, which is a popular microblogging service … Read More

It’s that time of year again – mark your London Book Fair calendar for April 10, as Altmetric will be making a splash! Don’t miss “THE BIG DEBATE: Business models – experimenting for the future ” panel at the BIC Supply Chain – Altmetric’s Founder, Euan Adie will be speaking on recent developments in scholarly publishing: “There is no denying that the last decade has seen some monumental changes within the publishing industry. The surging power of social media and direct to consumer selling, the ‘death’ of the physical book and the rise of the ebook, the on-going debate … Read More

Over the next few months we’ll be bringing you some posts from other members of the Altmetric and Digital Science team. Watch this space – these are some of the brightest and most innovative people you could wish to work with! We’re starting this week with Shane, the newest developer on the Altmetric team: “I thought I’d say a few words on why I’m really excited about altmetrics in general and why science needs to pay more attention to data other than citation counts. At a company conference last week we had a guest speaker, Daniel Glaser, who … Read More