Altmetric Blog

This is a guest post from Tuija Sonkkila, Leadership Support Services at Aalto University. CRIS crash course CRIS (Current Research Information System) is a new incarnation of semi-automated academic recordkeeping, a hotspot of data synchronized from University master data registries such as staff and project directories; enriched by metadata of activities, events and research output; and augmented with relations to e.g. research infrastructure. Many a CRIS acts also as a full-text repository. Aalto University in Finland is about to launch its CRIS during the first quarter … Read More

This is a guest post from Simon Porter,VP Academic Relationships and Knowledge Architecture at Digital Science.  It’s been just over a month since attention surrounding articles published in the The Conversation was first tracked by Altmetric, so it seems a good time to see how well this new form of publishing does in engaging the public when compared to other titles in the database. As The Conversation’s mission is to “break down the barriers to expert knowledge and opinion – to make it easier for academics to communicate their expertise to a more diverse … Read More

We’re delighted to see Altmetric’s Founder Euan Adie named as one of the Uk’s Top 50 Data Leaders and Influencers, in a list released today by Information Age. “The prestigious Data 50 list was whittled down from more than 200 nominations and shines a light on those transforming organisations, enhancing decision-making and driving business value through the use of data, as well as managing its proliferating growth.” Euan is described as being “at the forefront of the alternative metrics movement in academic research, which is changing the way scientists get credit for their work and how funders and governments … Read More

This month’s Altmetric Ambassador of the Month is Colleen Willis, a librarian at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in the United States. Colleen is what one might call a “jack of all trades” at the Academies Libraries, providing essential services for many leading international scholars. We sat down (virtually, of course) with Colleen to ask her about how she uses altmetrics in her current role, and what tips she has for others working with government or library services that want to advocate for altmetrics at their institutions. Tell me about your current work at the National … Read More

On Friday 9th October I attended the altmetrics15 workshop in Amsterdam with several of my colleagues. This was the last of three days of conferences, as the 2:AM altmetrics conference had taken place on the Wednesday and Thursday of the same week. At the 2:AM conference, the delegates had wrestled with some of the larger overarching issues to do with altmetrics – how do we define impact? How can we measure the impact of Public Engagement with Science initiatives? How can we arrive at standards for altmetrics? At the end of the two days, a panel consisting … Read More

Inspired by the engaging discussion at last week’s 2:AM conference, we thought now might be a good time to take a step back, refocus on the bigger picture, and remind ourselves why we are doing this altmetrics ‘thing’. The main reason? To help academics see who is saying what about their work, to ensure that they are aware of the attention it’s receiving, and to help them use this information to further their research and its eventual broader impacts. With that in mind, we’ve put together some top tips that anyone can use to get started interpreting their … Read More

Welcome to Altmetric’s “High Five” for September, a discussion of the top five scientific papers with the highest Altmetric scores this month. On a monthly basis, my High Five posts examine a selection of the most popular research outputs Altmetric has seen attention for that month. There really isn’t a theme this month to the articles that have seen the most attention via Altmetric, other than cool research!   3D perspective showing seasonal features that appear in the Hale Crater on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona   Paper #1. Evidence of Water on Mars “We seem to discover water on … Read More