Altmetric Blog

You’ve just received some great news. Your research, published recently in the Journal of Widget Technology, is receiving a lot of attention online. You log into Altmetric Explorer and download all of the discussion data for your article: hundreds of tweets, coverage in a dozen news outlets, and even a citation in a policy document! You excitedly call your co-authors to share the news. That’s interesting! they say. Is that a lot of attention? How does it compare to other widget studies research? As you hang up the phone, you realise you need a basis of comparison in order to … Read More

In this post, Stacy Konkiel, Senior Data Analyst at Altmetric, highlights the most cited and discussed altmetrics-related research published this year. In 2020, over 100 articles, preprints, and book chapters were published based on analyses of Altmetric data—far too many to list in a single blog post! So, we’re changing things up for our annual “research roundup”. Here, I’ve highlighted the most discussed and cited Altmetric-related research published in 2020. Top altmetrics research, by Altmetric Attention Score Twitter promotion predicts citation rates of cardiovascular articles: a preliminary analysis from … Read More

There’s little doubt that we are currently living in historic times. But what does the data from Facebook, blogs and news headlines on Covid-19 research tell us?  That’s what our 2020 Research Award winners hope to find out. Our award winners are Dr Fabio Castro Gouveia, a scientometrics and altmetrics specialist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil, and Dr Elaine Rabello, a researcher with dual appointments at the Institute of Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Wageningen University, Netherlands.  Dr Fabio Castro Gouveia (left) and Dr Elaine Rabello (right) are the winners of the 2020 … Read More

In this post, Stacy Konkiel, Director of Research Relations at Altmetric, gathers and categorizes the altmetrics-related research that published this year. Photo by M. B. M. on Unsplash Here, I’ve collected and categorized the 50 known articles, preprints and book chapters published in 2019 that analyze Altmetric data. We’re proud to continue to support scientometrics researchers worldwide by offering access to our data, free of charge–something we’ve done since Altmetric was founded in 2011. We’re also grateful to the researchers who study Altmetric data. Through their work, we can better understand the value of altmetrics in a variety … 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

Research is key to mastering the grand challenges that society faces, from climate change to curing cancer. Using evidence to make policy and assess short- and long-term implications of research require both expertise and resources. Scientometric research is critical to understand the complex research ecosystem, but this requires that scientometricians have the available information and tools to conduct this research. In order to make advances in the field of scientometrics, it’s obvious that researchers should have easy, direct access to: A diverse set of research information—not only publications and citations, but also grants, patents, … Read More

With a growing demand from funders and universities for researchers to engage with the public, altmetrics are seeing increased interest across academia. Altmetrics are used by researchers worldwide as a complement to citation-based data when attempting to track the influence of their work and the success of their online engagement activities. Trends in altmetrics can be used to understand engagement with disciplinary research, especially in the biological sciences–an area that sees relatively high levels of attention online. By learning from altmetrics data, microbiologists can sharpen their public outreach strategies to increase engagement with the research they … Read More

At Altmetric, we’re keen to see our data used to make advances in scholarly communication. To that end, we offer an annual research grant of up to $2,000 USD for a project that makes new discoveries about how research is shared and discussed online. Since 2016, the Altmetric Research Grant has funded research into: How to identify the research that will later make it into public policy documentsWho adds scholarly citations to Wikipedia articles, and when and how they do itHow research is shared in China and amongst the Chinese-speaking diaspora via WeChat “Official Accounts” For … Read More

Stacy Konkiel, Director of Research Relations at Altmetric, breaks down five of the most useful and interesting tidbits about Altmetric data.    Though Altmetric’s name is practically synonymous with altmetrics as a larger field of practice, there are a lot of things the larger community may not know about our data and how we track it! We’ve collected 95.8 million mentions of 12.4 million works to date, across 17 distinct types of data sources. Altmetric tracks research in all its diverse formats: books, articles, data sets, clinical trials, book chapters, news stories, websites, blog posts, reports, white papers, and … Read More

In this post, Stacy Konkiel, Director of Research Relations at Altmetric, gathers and categorizes the altmetrics related research that published this year. In 2018, the amount of Altmetric-related research that we’re aware of tripled. Typically, this research is quantitative in nature and offers new insights about the way research is communicated. Here, I’ve collected and categorized all 80+ known articles, preprints and conference proceedings published in 2018 that analyze Altmetric data. We’re proud to continue to support scientometrics researchers worldwide by offering access to our data, free of charge–something we’ve … Read More