Altmetric Blog

Altmetric launched Altmetric for Books in 2016, and since then we’ve tracked over 4.6 million online mentions of more than 1.1 million books and book chapters.  In this post, I’ll share the most interesting tidbits about how researchers and the public engage with both trade books and scholarly monographs and their chapters.   Altmetrics for books: what the literature tells us Scientometricians — academics who use a data-driven approach to study “the science of research” — have long been aware that journal-centric metrics like citation counts are often inadequate for understanding the … Read More

Digital libraries contain loads of important scholarly resources: digitized primary sources like letters and illuminated manuscripts, arts scholarship like images and videos, and even interactive, peer reviewed websites. Digital libraries (also known as “digital special collections”) are older than their institutional repository cousins, and also much more complex. Unfortunately, many digital library websites are not optimized to share the basic metadata that allows Altmetric to find and follow conversations around their digitized objects like we can for journal articles and books.  That means that the broader impacts of digital library content is difficult to understand at scale, which in turn … Read More

In another monthly blog post written by Science Wordsmith Lucy Goodchild, we explore the findings and attention around a piece of research published in the previous month that caught the public’s attention. Listen to the accompanying podcast here. Here on Earth we are about halfway between the center and the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. If we were to take a giant cosmic ruler, we would measure that distance at about 25,000 light years – the distance you would travel in 25,000 years if you were moving at the speed of light (about 240 quadrillion kilometers). But we … Read More