Altmetric Blog

Researchers! Are you a Wikipedia wizard, a social media and blog post seeker or a patent mention master? Take our quiz to find out what type of Altmetric attention you most like to receive for your research and enter our competition to win a £20 Amazon gift card! The quiz should only take a couple of minutes to complete. To enter our competition to win an Amazon gift card, simply tweet your result using #AltmetricResearcherQuiz by the 6th November. When you complete the quiz, you’ll also receive a link to one of our helpful guides which we think … Read More

In this post, Stacy Konkiel, Director of Research Relations at Altmetric, examines the evaluation uses and limitations of the new article-level subject data within Altmetric Explorer.     Last week, we introduced an exciting new feature in the Altmetric Explorer: article-level subject classifications. In this post, I want to explain what this means in practice for those who use the Explorer for evaluation: how it’s an improvement upon current subject classification practices used by other bibliometrics data providers, but also its current limitations. There are a number of bibliometrics … Read More

In this post, Inez van Korlaar, Head of Marketing, talks about how Altmetric has made some major search enhancements to the Altmetric Explorer by allowing users to search by subject area and author affiliation. We’re very proud to introduce two new search features (both of which have been high on our users’ wish lists for many years) to the Altmetric Explorer this month; we’ve integrated data from the search and discovery database Dimensions to make it possible to search by subject area and author affiliation! Being able to search by … Read More

Welcome to the September High Five! On a monthly basis, the High Five post highlights the articles that have received the most attention from a particular attention source type – whether it’s blogs, policy documents, Twitter, Wikipedia, or something else! This month we’ll be focusing on the pieces published in September that have been mentioned in posts on academic and non-academic blogs. #1 Bring your umbrella Image credit: ChristopherPluta under CC0 Number one on our list this month is ‘Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase … Read More

Ahead of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair we summarise recently published strategic publisher insights gathered by analyzing altmetrics data. Visit the Digital Science booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair in hall 4.2 location L97. With the ever-growing prominence of research metrics, it can be challenging to understand the meaning behind a certain score, trend or spike. In this post, I’ll highlight some recently published studies, blogs and other content detailing where altmetrics data has been utilized to gather insights for practical applications across marketing, editorial, and sales departments within publishers. What altmetrics can tell us … Read More

This article by Lily Troia, Engagement Manager at Altmetric, summarises the collaborative research project that she did with, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Virginia Tech, Inga Haugen on creating altmetrics user personas.  “Scholarship is not an ‘it’.” This deceivingly simple statement from a 2000 article on extension education carries substantial implications for how we approach scholarly communication and impact evaluation. Scholarship, the authors suggest, is an iterative process, where outputs and other scholarly activities are components of a larger system, not end-points of a one-way exchange of information. Extension education in the … Read More

In this post Altmetric Implementation Manager, Charlotte Perry-Houts, and Senior Publisher Solutions Specialist, Tyler Ruse, examine the importance of publishers providing good metadata and describe the data Altmetric needs to provide accurate tracking. Among the many services that publishers provide authors throughout the publication process, one has become increasingly valuable in recent years. It is not specifically the digital age or the internet that has driven the increase in importance, but it is certainly a key factor. We’re talking about metadata. From humble beginnings rooted in the definition of the word (“data describing data”), early uses … Read More

Welcome to the August High Five! On a monthly basis, the High Five post highlights the articles that have received the most attention from a particular attention source type – whether it’s blogs, policy documents, Twitter, Wikipedia, or something else! This month we’ll be focusing on the pieces published in July that have been mentioned in posts on public Facebook pages. #1 The world is your oyster! Credit: Adapted from Getty Our first article this month is actually a careers piece, ‘Why it is not a ‘failure’ to leave … Read More

In this post, Amy Rees, Product and Client Support Specialist, and Cat Williams, Chief Operations Officer,  introduce the new attention source tracked by Altmetric. The post covers how Altmetric track patents, how to access the data and the new insights it uncovers. In April of this year you may have noticed a new colour in the Altmetric donut! The new orange segment represents our newest, and possibly most highly requested source: patent data.   Adding patent data to our database has provided an entirely different lens through which to explore the potential impacts of research, … Read More

In this guest blog post Karen Rowlett, Research Publications Advisor at the University of Reading, explains her role in promoting the Altmetric Explorer and Badges at her institution. This post also covers how their Altmetric tools and data are used to keep track of mentions of the University’s publications and uncover strategic insights. The University of Reading has had a subscription to Altmetic Explorer for over two years and we are now finding ways to embed the data in our everyday activities surrounding research and research impact. In my role as Research Publications Adviser at the University … Read More