Altmetric Blog

Thinking back to the start of this year, it’s hard to take in how much has changed at Altmetric. We’ve had a brilliant, busy, fun 12 months – which now seem to have gone by so quickly! A few highlights to mention include: – We built and launched our newest platform, Altmetric for Institutions. Take up has been really positive and we currently have over 15 institutions either already implemented or in the process of being set up across the UK, Europe, Australia and the US. – We helped organise and run the … Read More

At a recent conference workshop on altmetrics tools, librarians were compared to drug dealers: getting researchers hooked on tools to help them get the most out of their research. As the momentum around altmetrics in higher education gathers pace and Altmetric for Institutions is increasingly adopted by research institutions, there are huge opportunities for librarians to position themselves as a central support team – albeit promoting good scholarly communications practices rather than drugs – and leading the way to integrate altmetrics in institutions. I joined the Altmetric team … Read More

It’s starting to feel Christmassy at Altmetric HQ, and we’ve been busy pulling together our annual list of which published research has been attracting the most attention online in 2014. Based on data we’ve collated over the year, the list takes into account all mentions and shares of articles published from November 2013 onwards in mainstream and social media, blogs, post-publication peer-review forums, bookmarking sites and platforms such as Reddit and YouTube. Access the full Top 100 list We’ve excluded editorial, comment and review content, as we wanted to focus specifically on original … Read More

I agree with lots on the excellent ImpactStory blog but I really don’t agree with this post arguing that Nature’s new SciShare experiment is bad for altmetrics. It really isn’t. I figured it was worth a post here to explain my thinking. In my view it’s mildly inconvenient for altmetrics vendors. 🙂 But you can’t really spin it as “bad” in this context beyond that and given that there are good aspects too I think the title of the ImpactStory post is overkill. I may be biased. We share an office in London with Nature Publishing … Read More

We often get asked during demos, webinars and conference sessions for more detail on the news sources we track for mentions of academic research – and in particular how we do it, and how global our coverage is.   So firstly, what do we track, and why? We see mentions in mainstream media and news as a crucial part of the wider engagement a piece of research achieves. If an article, book, or dataset is picked up and getting a lot of coverage amongst mainstream media outlets, chances are it has a notable societal significance and the … Read More