Altmetric Blog

Ahead of the recent 1:AM altmetrics conference we ran a hack day at the Macmillan offices in King’s Cross. Lots of exciting ideas and developments came out of the day, and there was one in particular we wanted to share… Altmetric have been a supporting member of ORCID, an organization which enables researchers to create a unique identifier for themselves that they can then associate with all of their research outputs, since early 2013. It’s always been possible for our  database to capture and store the journal and publisher information for the 2.5 million+ published articles and … Read More

You can get the dataset from and the PDF of this post here: Adie, Euan (2014): Attention! A study of open access vs non-open access articles. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1213690 There are lots of good reasons to publish in open access journals. Two of the most commonly given ones are the beliefs that OA articles are read more widely and that they generate higher citations (for more on this check out slide 5 of Macmillan’s Author Insights Survey, which is up on figshare). Do open access articles get higher altmetric counts? In celebration of Open Access … Read More

Here in the UK, HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which distributes central funding to English universities) is currently running an independent review on the role of metrics in research assessment. As part of that, a couple of weeks ago the review panel convened a workshop at the University of Sussex: In Metrics We Trust? Prospects & pitfalls of new research metrics. I was lucky enough to attend and thought it was a really useful day, not least because it was a chance to hear some pretty compelling points of view. I’m excited that altmetrics … Read More

Diving deeper into scholarly attention with Mendeley Lately at Altmetric, we’ve been thinking about how to better showcase readership statistics from academics. We already do basic tracking of Twitter user demographics (which does include academics) but from that set of data, we weren’t been able to give much more detail on academic attention. And so it seemed logical for us to turn to a different service, like Mendeley, which already tracks readership information in quite some detail. Mendeley is a software platform that is very popular amongst scholars as a reference manager and e-reader. A user who saves a paper … Read More

Are you interested in altmetrics, but aren’t really sure what they are, how they might be useful for your institution, or what the Altmetric for Institutions platform can offer? Sign up for one of our upcoming webinars to learn more – there’ll be a run through of the basics and we’ll take a look at some ways librarians, research managers, communications offices and faculty management are using the data. Just select the session you’d like to join from the list below and click the link to sign up. Upcoming sessions: Wednesday 3rd June, 10am ET/3pm BST – … Read More

Are you interested in altmetrics, but aren’t really sure what they are, how they might be useful for your institution, or what the Altmetric for Institutions platform can offer? Sign up for one of our upcoming webinars to learn more – there’ll be a run through of the basics and we’ll take a look at some ways librarians, research managers, communications offices and faculty management are using the data. Just select the session you’d like to join from the list below and click the link to sign up. Upcoming sessions An introduction to altmetrics, use cases and the Explorer for Institutions: … Read More

It’s been a week now since the 1AM conference, which we organized along with Springer, eLife, Elsevier, PLoS and the Wellcome Trust. To get a flavour of the event here are some posts from Eleanor Beal (Royal Society), Lucy Lambe (Imperial), Brian Kelly (Cetis), a news piece in THE and Andy Tattersall (Sheffield). Barring a couple of sessions where there were technical difficulties the whole thing was streamed and you can watch it back on YouTube. We’ll be putting slides up on the website and you can already find some on the … Read More