Altmetric Blog

Welcome to the Altmetric High Five! On a monthly basis, my High Five posts examine a selection of the most popular research outputs Altmetric has seen attention for that month. This month’s theme is evolution and genetics – of bacteria, of monsters, and even of unibrows.   B0010027 Cross section through mycoplasma mycoides Paper #1. Our top paper this month is “Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome,” published in Science magazine. In the study, researchers from the Craig Venter Institute built a minimal genome, or a genome including only the genes essential for … Read More

Elizabeth Gadd, Research Policy Manager at Loughborough University shares their experience of academic reactions to the Altmetric Explorer: Last week Loughborough University’s Altmetric Explorer trial subscription sprang into life and was launched to staff via two training sessions expertly run by Natalia Madjeravic. What follows here are some comments we had from academics during and immediately after the training sessions. They are indicative, I think, of some of the uncertainty around altmetrics generally, and also some of the specific concerns we’re going to need to address over the coming months as we test the service across … Read More

Altmetric now supports a new scholarly identifier: Uniform Resource Name (URN). A URN is a type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and is used as a unique identifier for online content and resources. URNs are used widely across European institutional repositories including the DiVA Portal, which hosts research outputs produced by 40 universities and research institutions based in Sweden and Norway. By supporting new identifiers such as URNs, Altmetric can track more research outputs across a broader range of disciplines, countries and … Read More

In keeping with the “publisher perspective” theme we established last month, our featured Altmetric Ambassador for March is Paul Trevorrow, Executive Journals Editor at Wiley. Paul is based in Chichester and has followed the development of altmetrics and Altmetric since 2012. Have a look at his responses below to find out more about why he finds altmetrics useful: Tell me about your current work at Wiley. What does a typical day involve for you? I manage a portfolio of Physical Sciences journals. It is a vibrant and varied position and no day is typical which … Read More

Earlier this month Professor Rob Borofsky of the Center for a Public Anthropology at the Hawaii Pacific University launched a brand new site that gives some fascinating insights into the online attention that anthropological research receives in blogs, the mainstream media, and public policy documents.  We were really excited to see this new tool go live – the site it it’s entirety was built by Rob, and Altmetric data is fed in via API. We caught up with him to learn more about what his goals for … Read More

Back in 2013 I wrote a blog post mentioning that NISO was bringing together interested parties to try to define some standards around altmetrics – what they mean, how they can and should be used etc. At the time I was a bit skeptical that it wouldn’t be too much of a distraction but we definitely wanted to be involved. Over the past year or so – after some preliminary scoping work led ably by Martin Fenner – we split into three groups to help define data quality, use cases and output types & … Read More

Welcome to this month’s High Five at Altmetric. On a monthly basis, my High Five posts examine a selection of the most popular research papers Altmetric has seen attention for that month. This month, we are paying special attention to research papers on the topic of Zika. All Countries and Territories with Active Zika Virus Transmission. Image: CDC An Emerging Zika Pandemic “The Zika virus (ZIKV), a flavivirus related to yellow fever, dengue, West Nile, and Japanese encephalitis, originated in the Zika forest in Uganda and was discovered in a rhesus monkey in 1947.” – … Read More