Altmetric Blog

As we near the end of 2013, it’s time for us at Altmetric to reflect on another fascinating year of scholarly conversations. Last December, we put together a list of the top 10 most popular articles from 2012, which was also publicised by the Nature Newsblog. Throughout the year, we also presented our “High Five” series of posts, which summed up the 5 most popular articles at the end of each month. For this year’s final wrap up, we decided to do something a bit more ambitious, and created a special microsite to showcase the … Read More

Donuts are now integrated into 5 Royal Society of Chemistry journals We’re pleased to announce that Altmetric donuts have now been integrated into 5 Royal Society of Chemistry journals. The 5 journals participating in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s new altmetrics initiative are: Energy and Environmental Science, Dalton Transactions, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, Chemical Society Reviews, and Lab on a Chip. Our donuts now appear in ‘Metrics’ tabs on article pages in the participating journals. Examples of the integration can be seen here on a journal article page, and here on a custom … Read More

Welcoming Paul, our new CTO Before we jump into our latest news, we would like to extend a warm welcome to Paul Mucur, who recently joined the Altmetric team as our new Chief Technology Officer. Previously, Paul worked as a technical lead for Nature Publishing Group. Independently, he was also part of the team that created the awesome SciCombinator project for last year’s Rails Rumble competition.   Altmetric shortlisted for the 2013 ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation Altmetric has made it to the list of finalists for the 2013 Association of … Read More

The Altmetric Bookmarklet: a free and useful reading companion People are talking about scholarly papers online, but what are they saying? And what digital tools are they using to communicate their ideas? In this blog post, we’d like to introduce you to the Altmetric Bookmarklet, a free browser tool that lets you easily find out how much attention that recent papers have received online. The image on the left gives you an idea of the data that you’ll see. First, the Bookmarklet shows you the Altmetric donut, which is colour-coded according to which sources have mentioned the article. Inside … Read More

We receive a lot of questions about the sources that we track. On our new website, we’ve put up a lot of detailed information about Altmetric’s data sources, including Twitter, mainstream news outlets, blogs, and others. On the main Sources page, you’ll find information at a glance about 4 key points for every source: Activity: How actively the source is used as a communication medium. Level of Insight: The depth of the insights that a typical mention in the source delivers. Content Creators: The kinds of users who create … Read More

Be notified when papers of interest are mentioned As an author of a scholarly paper, it can often be informative to read what people are saying and writing about your work. Alternatively, if you’re a reader or a blogger, you might be interested in knowing when a paper is mentioned on the news or blogged about. By opting to receive e-mail alerts about specific papers, you can follow the stories about the research as they develop.   Receive a maximum of 1 e-mail per day You can sign up to receive alerts pertaining to 1 or many papers. The attention surrounding multiple … Read More

The Altmetric website gets a fresh new look If you’ve recently paid a visit to our main website, Altmetric.com, you might have noticed that it’s undergone a complete makeover. Launched early last week, our brand new site features a new introductory video, as well as a plethora of useful and up-to-date content about Altmetric and the various things that we do. To provide specific information to our different audiences, we’ve created special pages for publishers, librarians and repository managers, and researchers. We’ve also put up an  … Read More

New altmetrics reading material Mike Taylor has written an article in Research Trends entitled “The Challenges of Measuring Social Impact Using Altmetrics”, which is a comprehensive overview of altmetrics today. Also, David Gibson, the executive editor of the Journal of Ecology, has written a short post about article level metrics and how to access them through Readcube, which uses Altmetric data. Previously, David Gibson and his colleagues had written this great blog post about the uptake of Journal of Ecology papers using Altmetric data obtained using rAltmetric.   New badge and donut embeds Making … Read More

Updates from Altmetric It’s been a hugely exciting couple of weeks for all of us at Altmetric. First of all, we’re delighted that John Wiley & Sons, Inc. will be running a trial of Altmetric for 6 months on a number of their journals. Authors and readers can now view Altmetric badges directly on Wiley journal articles (for example, this one), and then click through to article details pages (like this one). On the article details pages for the different journals undergoing the Altmetric trial, Wiley have provided links to surveys on article level metrics … Read More

Attention WordPress bloggers! Our developer Will has just created an awesome and free Altmetric WordPress plugin that allows you to insert Altmetric donuts and badges into any blog post. Now you can easily insert a colourful donut into your text, just as it’s done on the Interactions posts of the Altmetric blog. For example, the WordPress plugin was recently used to display donuts in the April High Five.   Step 1: Manually install the plugin (.zip) into WordPress. It’s extremely simple to get started. First, download the Altmetric WordPress … Read More