American Speech Language Hearing Association

“The Altmetric badges help our users to find the research which is most relevant and interesting to them.”

Mike Cannon, director of serial publications and editorial services

About ASHA

The American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA) is a professional association that supports speech-language pathologists, audiologists and speech, language and hearing scientists. It is based in Maryland, USA and has almost 200,000 international members. The vision of ASHA is ‘making effective communication, a human right, accessible and achievable for all.’

ASHA currently publishes four journals: ‘The American Journal of Audiology’, ‘American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology’, ‘Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research’ and ‘Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools’.

We spoke to Mike Cannon, Director of Serial Publications and Editorial Services, to hear more about how they’ve been using altmetrics to analyse and inform their journal strategy and integrated the Altmetric API into the Journals Academy blog.

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Altmetrics at ASHA

ASHA has been using Altmetric badges since its journals were migrated a new platform

ASHAWire, in 2014. Because of the growing amount of research that they were publishing, ASHA were keen to introduce Altmetric badges as a way of efficiently guiding users to articles that had received the most attention.

As ASHA’s list of publications grew, so did usage of the Altmetric badges. ASHA found that its users would regularly click through from the badges to see the Altmetric details page in order to explore the attention an item had received in more depth.

In late 2014, Mike and his team began using the Altmetric Explorer for Publishers platform. The initial goal for doing so was to see how its publications compared to other publications in the same discipline, and today they use the analytics to help in strategic decision making around the scope and direction of their journals.

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Incorporating the Altmetric API

Most recently ASHA has worked with Altmetric to develop a widget, using the Altmetric API, that shows which articles across the journals platform are receiving the most attention. The new widget has been added onto the front page of ASHA’s Journals Academy blog to display a list of the top trending articles published in the journals, sortable by time period.

The aim of the list is to provide users with a way to sift through the latest research and find the most talked about ASHA articles. Being able to filter titles in this way has also helped ASHA in achieving its objectives to improve the dissemination of their publications to a broader audience. Mike and his colleagues were also pleased to see that, by giving their users access to altmetrics, they have seen an increase in the conversations around their research in online channels.

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The future of Altmetrics at ASHA

Mike and his team are already using Altmetric data to identify the most effective channels to promote ASHA articles on alongside their established program-specific outlets.

They plan to continue to use altmetrics to help ASHA users find the most relevant articles, and are looking for ways to further promote the benefits of altmetrics to new members and authors of ASHA.