Altmetric Blog

We get asked a lot how researchers can best make use of altmetrics and the data we provide. Our thinking around this splits the potential use cases into 3 main categories: Reputation management: because Altmetric tracks attention sources in real time to provide a collated record of the mentions and shares of your research as soon as it’s published, it’s much easier to see who is saying what about it. This gives you the opportunity to step in early to engage or clarify details of your research where necessary and helps ensure your findings … Read More

Listening to feedback is our #1 priority At Altmetric, we always take an “outside in” approach to product development, which is informed by feedback from users, customers, and other stakeholders at every step of the journey. Our Altmetric Beta Tester Programme helps us embed user research directly into development sprints, allowing us to work with users to test run features that aren’t available to the public yet. (By the way, if you haven’t joined the Altmetric Beta Tester Programme yet, e-mail us to get involved!) Not only do we emphasise the importance of listening to our users as we build new … Read More

Last week, I was delighted to take part in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the r/AskScience subreddit. It was awesome to speak with so many people from all around the world about research impact metrics, and it got even better when I learned that, for a brief moment, we even made it onto the Reddit homepage! Here’s what we covered. Are metrics at all useful to understand true impact? It was clear from the questions asked that many redditors are as concerned as I am about the abuse and misinterpretation of research metrics. I tried my … Read More

On Wednesday (11th May) we held our first ever Atmetric Twitter Chat with Göttingen State and University Library’s Project Manager and Altmetric Ambassador, Daniel Beucke. We asked Daniel a series of questions about his role and use of altmetrics. Daniel told us about the growing demand for altmetrics in reporting within the University and the different ways he believes the data can support institutions as well as researchers. Check out the Storify below to read the full interview:         [<a href=”//storify.com/cataltmetric/altmetchat” target=”_blank”>View the story “#altmetchat” on Storify</a>] … Read More

This month we’ve selected Biomedical Information Specialist Librarian Valeria Scotti as our Ambassador of the Month! Valeria is a passionate advocate for altmetrics as well as the use of Altmetric tools to help researchers track the online attention for their work. She regularly hosts workshops and courses on the application of altmetrics and recently won the best poster competition at the Simpar 15 conference for her poster promoting alternative metrics. Read on to find out about Valeria’s role and why she loves our donuts: Tell me about your current work at Fondazione IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo di … Read More

We are pleased to announce that Altmetric has joined the Annotating All Knowledge Coalition, an initiative spearheaded by Hypothes.is and comprised of many innovators in the field of scholarly communication, including PLOS, CrossRef, and the HathiTrust. The purpose of the Coalition is to create an open, interoperable annotation layer over online content. Much like the written marginalia that researchers have added to books and scholarly journals for centuries, these web annotations are excellent tools for the discussion and enhancement of research. Altmetric’s role in joining the group is clear: to help discover and articulate how these annotations … Read More

Cross-posted and adapted from the Digital Science blog on 25th April 2016 Join me for a Reddit Ask Me Anything at 6pm GMT/1pm EDT on the 10th May! The Reddit Ask Me Anything forum is a great way to engage and interact with subject experts in a direct and honest Q&A, asking those burning questions you’ve always wanted to get their perspective on! Mark Hahnel, the founder of Figshare, Euan Adie, the founder of Altmetric and John Hammersley, co-founder of Overleaf, have also all participated in this popular discussion forum. Read More

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 Big Trends – trends throughout history for dinosaurs, human mortality, melting ice caps and more. Without further ado, here are the most popular academic papers in April 2016. Paper #1. If you aren’t rich, where you live affects how long you’ll live. Image credit: barnyz, Flickr.com Our first high five paper is “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014,” published … Read More