Accelerating impact analysis with Altmetric

“Altmetric is one of the few providers of data on non-academic impact and the only one we know we can use as a single source for all the different measures to be able to show the societal relevance of our researchers.”

– Mathijs de Zwaan, Co-ordinator, Research Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Matthijs de Zwaan is Co-ordinator for the Research Intelligence team at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU).

The team helps the university’s researchers to discover and demonstrate the scholarly and societal impact of research carried out at the institution. This helps to support everything from grant applications and talent hiring to forming effective research collaborations.

Typically, the team looks at the research impact of a department from VU (rather than the institution as a whole or any individuals). After agreeing which institutes to benchmark against for comparison, Matthijs and his team set to work with Altmetric Explorer – a Digital Science solution that reveals the attention to academic research by tracking mentions across media, policy and social sources.

Matthijs describes the workflow. “We start with publication-level data from our main database, using sources like CRIS, SCOPUS and OpenAlex, then enrich it with the metadata from Altmetric,” he explains. “We upload the DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for the data into Altmetric Explorer and aggregate the metrics at different levels, depending on the questions we want to answer for the specific project. Incidentally, the Altmetric team is quick to respond if we ask them to add any new sources to the database, which is very useful.”

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Precise customization for specific insights

The system then produces an interactive dashboard that showcases the data in clear visualizations. Providing a wide range of metrics, it offers multiple filters so users can customize the results with great precision.

Altmetric Highlights page dashboard (Click for higher resolution image)

To illustrate how it works, Matthijs offers the example of measures that are relevant for societal impact.

“Take our university medical centre’s Cancer Centre, which is a leading international centre for cancer research,” he says. “The dashboard has a filter for cancer types, so people working on those within specific sub-departments in the Centre can filter down to the research that’s relevant to them. If we want to look at the geographic distribution of mentions in policy documents, we can click on any of the countries to see the policy documents published there. And we can do the same with news stories, for example.”

Matthjis turns to the section on the clinical impact of research, which can feature anything from clinical guidelines through to academic work by any of the institutes he’s chosen to include in the analysis. “For all this you can also drill down to specific fields such as cancer types. But the main way this intelligence is used is in management-level decision-making.”

By identifying which research areas are receiving attention from society and clinical practice, the intelligence gives university leaders a steer on strategic focus.

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A major step forward in understanding impact

The clinical impact element is a recent addition to Altmetric – and it’s been getting a lot of attention from medical researchers because it’s something that is highly valued in the field.

“For us, being able to show how our researchers’ work continues to influence actual clinical practice is very relevant,” Matthijs confirms.

Mentions by Clinical Guidelines

For VU, as for other universities, it’s increasingly important to be able to show and quantify different kinds of non-academic impact.

“Altmetric is one of the few providers of this kind of data,” says Matthijs, “and the only one we know we can use as a single source for all these different measures – media, policy, clinical relevance and so on – to enable us to show the societal relevance of the researchers at our university.”

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Find out what Altmetric can do for you

Interested in how Altmetric can support your organization? Reach out to the team and unlock more accurate impact analysis.

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