Altmetric Blog

One of the High Five papers this month finally describes HOW chameleons change color! Hint: They do not change color to match their surroundings. Panther Chameleon at Zürich Zoo, Switzerland. Credit: Marc Staub, originally posted to Flickr as IMG_8957. Welcome to the March 2015 High Five here at Altmetric! In this blog post, my second for Altmetric, I’ll be leading you on a tour of the top 5 peer-reviewed scientific articles this month according to Altmetric’s scoring system. On a monthly basis from here on out, my High Five posts will examine a selection of the most popular … Read More

For this post in our researcher blog series, we decided to examine some interesting examples of researchers integrating the data into their workflows. We also reached out to the six academics who created these examples, to review their usage and collect some feedback (positive or otherwise) about their experience of the data. Three out of the six researchers we talked to said they had first heard about Altmetric from other academics, either on Twitter or through internal communication within a university. This is interesting as it suggests that one academic’s knowledge of a tool can potentially change the behaviors of … Read More

You’re an Academic Librarian or Research Officer and support researchers making their research freely available online via open access. A major part of this process is enabling researchers to deposit open access versions of their work in your institutional repository or research publications system. So how do you encourage your researchers to deposit full-text papers? Do you focus on advocating the societal benefits of increased access to research during presentations and training? Perhaps you share repository download statistics to demonstrate usage? Or implement tools to encourage high open access deposit rates? Do funder open access policies also feature high … Read More

Altmetric Product Specialist Ben McLeish recently attended an Altmetrics workshop hosted at the Carol Davila University Bucharest. Here he reports on what took place and what he took away from the day:  On February 18th 2015 Carol Davila University Bucharest held an event dedicated to the emerging field of alternative metrics. The event was organized and introduced by Cristina Huidiu, one of Carol Davila’s librarians and a metrics expert all by herself. You can catch up on comments from the event on the #altmetricsWHO hashtag … Read More

Many of you will be familiar with the Altmetric donut, often to be found nestling on article details pages across many publisher platforms both large and small. The data provided there gives authors and readers some great insight into who is talking about the article, and can be useful to them in identifying new content to read or new communities to engage with. But how are the publishers themselves using Altmetric data, and what value do they get from it? The (kind of) short answer is: in lots of different ways we … Read More