Radiological Society of North America

Defining the challenge

The mission of the non-profit Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) is to promote excellence in patient care and health care delivery through education, research and technological innovation.

Its publishing division, RSNA Journals, publishes six peer-reviewed radiology journals, on topics ranging from radiology research to cancer imaging studies. To support the Society’s mission, a key objective for RSNA Journals is to understand its readers and its reach, in order to make smart editorial decisions and market the journals as effectively as possible. 

Adopting altmetrics

Bethanne Wilson is RSNA’s Director of Journal Business and Operations. She oversees the team involved in sales, subscriptions and permissions, as well as the peer review team and the online production website team.

“It’s essential that we can get the full picture of who our publications are reaching and align them with our readers’ needs,” she explains. “We use Altmetric Explorer for a variety of purposes. An important one is to help us pull out a list of the top-performing papers in our journals; by combining altmetrics with citations and downloads, we get a better insight into their impact. We’re also able to compare our own articles with the top 100 articles published in radiology over the previous year, which helps us benchmark against our competitors.”

These capabilities help RSNA Journals to shape its publishing strategy, reward its authors with recognition, and identify the best talent for the future.

In addition, Bethanne now finds it easier to meet the needs of her editors, who want to know as quickly as possible how a paper is performing. She explains: “Citations and views will always be important, but Altmetric data gives us a much earlier indicator of the reach of the paper. It’s really useful for our editors to see which topics impact a broader audience, and it’s now a big part of how we judge a paper’s impact.”

Supporting the mission

“Understanding how our articles are reaching different audiences is really important for societies like ours,” concludes Bethanne. “The evidence we get from Altmetric Explorer is helping us in our mission to advance science through radiology.”

“What Altmetric Explorer has done is show there’s engagement out there that people weren’t aware of or weren’t really tracking. We can now track all that additional engagement. And our editors now understand that articles can have far more use and impact than just the citations they receive.” 

Looking ahead

Bethanne is keen to expand the Society’s use of Altmetric Explorer by introducing it to other departments. In particular, she believes it would be valuable to both the Marketing & Information team and the Innovation & Development team. 

She also plans to make more use of Altmetric data to increase author engagement. “We like to support our authors as well as we can, and one way we can do that is by helping them promote their works,” she explains. “Having more detailed metrics is very useful for this, and the Altmetric Badges allow authors to show all the online attention their paper has received at a glance.”