Altmetric Blog

It only seems like yesterday that we were in Bucharest for the 3:AM altmetrics conference, so it was a bit of a surprise that September came around so quickly and we found ourselves heading to Toronto for 4:AM, which was co-hosted this year by the Ryerson Social Media Lab. Mike Taylor presenting at the altmetrics17 workshop Our week began with an information-packed day at the altmetrics17 workshop, where we saw loads of great examples of researchers using our data and took part in some thought-provoking discussions – a lot of the conversation highlighted how … Read More

We’ve been busy improving our policy tracking system this year to bring you more mentions of research in policy documents with improved text-mining accuracy and across lots more sources. Policy documents have always been an important attention source for us, helping you uncover mentions of research in significant policy sources — mentions that otherwise might go undiscovered. This month we’ve launched a brand new system to find more mentions of research in our growing collection of policy and guidance sources and with greater accuracy. Altmetric have now collected over 1.1 million mentions of research outputs in policy … Read More

Digital Science has just released a new report, “Championing the Success of Women in STEM”. The report highlights the importance of tracking metrics for scholarly endeavors, in order to understand if and where gender discrepancies exist, so that we might work towards fixing them. In short, it underscores the relevance of the adage, “What gets measured, gets managed.” Included are pieces on tracking speaker demographics at STEM conferences, so that we can achieve better gender “parity at the podium”; understanding differences in research funding by gender; positive changes over time in astronomy and … Read More

Welcome to the Altmetric High Five for September! On a monthly basis, my High Five posts examine a selection of the most popular research outputs Altmetric has seen attention for that month. Our papers this month detail a wide range of exciting and sometimes controversial discoveries, from the celebrated grave of a female Viking warrior, to a “pen” that can potentially detect cancer cells in seconds while a patient is on the operating table.     Viking Helmets. Credit: Helgi Halldórsson from Reykjavík, Iceland – Viking Arms and Armor Paper #1. Wonder Woman Our first High Five paper is … Read More

Jean Liu (Product Development Manager at Altmetric) speaks at the 2017 NatureJobs Career Expo in London in a workshop on Product Management. I’m what you might call an Altmetric veteran. I joined the company in 2012, first as a writer for this Altmetric Blog and data analyst. (Somehow, my 2013 post “The Numbers Behind #icanhazpdf” still ranks as one of the most visited on our site!) As one of the first employees at Altmetric, I had the opportunity to be involved in quite a few different parts of the business, including data curation … Read More

Behind the curtain changes aren’t always interesting to people on the outside but as we’re going into conference season I wanted to share details about some exciting changes at Altmetric. Many of you already know Kathy Christian – she joined Altmetric in 2014 as our COO and since then she has been helping to steer Altmetric in the right direction. In the past three years we’ve relaunched the Explorer, worked closely with government and funders and made sure that education, training & support are an important part of what we do. I’m now stepping sideways and Kathy will take … Read More

With the multitude of online communication channels available it is essential for researchers to manage their online reputation and effectively plan their online promotion and public engagement tactics. We recently hosted a webinar where we invited two experts in the field of scholarly reputation management to share their knowledge and guidance for effectively planning an online outreach strategy.   Managing your online profile Jason Steinhauer is a public historian and Director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University. As … Read More

A big focus of ours at Altmetric has always been how we can help people really dig into the data to get a better understanding of who is engaging most with their research, and why. Since launching the second version of our Explorer platform in 2016, we’ve been working to add features and sources that make the attention data even more accessible. Today, we’re pleased to announce some of our biggest developments in this area to date – exciting new functionalities that makes it possible to use altmetrics in all sorts of new ways: … Read More

Editor’s Note:  Today’s post is from Sara Rouhi. Sara manages business development for Altmetric in the US and Canada. She is an active member of the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Education Committee and the 2015 recipient of their SSP Emerging Leader Award. We’re cross-posting today with the Scholarly Kitchen blog. This past week, three distinct moments came together for me prompting me to write this blog post: a peer review conference, a debate on the journal impact factor (JIF), and an art exhibit. I’m just coming back the 8th International Peer … Read More

In our latest case study, we report on how the University of Surrey are using Altmetric tools and data to underpin their five-year research strategic plan. We spoke to Dr. Abigail McBirnie, Bibliometrics Advisor at the University, about how the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions is helping them achieve their challenging targets. Abigail and teams across the institution are using the platform and data in a variety of ways, including: Engagement – The bibliometrics service within the Library of the University use the Altmetric Explorer to provide qualitative data that is used alongside quantitative, citation based, data to provide a … Read More