4. Increase visibility and understanding of primary research
and value to institution
Demonstrate how primary research increases perception
of institution’s value to trustees, donors and general
public
Have measurements to back up statements and
reasoning
5.
6. Understand research online visibility & value
Demonstrate how primary research increases perception of
institution reputation & value to community
Have measurements to back up statements & reasoning
7. Funders looking for proof of “broader impacts”
[often defined as “an effect, change, or benefit to the economy,
society, culture, public policies, health, the environment, etc.” ]
Grant agencies and private donors want
recipients to broaden dissemination to everyone
8. Journal impact factor is a citation ratio:
number of cites in the current year to any items published in the journal in the previous
2 years and the number of substantive articles (source items) published in the same 2
years.
10. Altmetric (based in UK): supported by Digital Science division of MacMillan
Science & Education
Their mission: “track and analyze the online activity around scholarly literature”
Measure the impact of research papers, books and datasets
Track social media sites, newspapers, government policy documents and other
sources for mentions of scholarly articles.
View, Analyze and Report on metrics with Altmetric Explorer
www.altmetricexplorer.com
12. DOI:
Unique ID
assigned through registration
agency
Identifies content
Provides persistent link to Internet
location
Publisher assigns DOI when
article published electronically
13. Quality of the paper
Quality of the researchers
Whole story
It’s only one piece of the conversation.
14. Identify social media attention not citing research article with
a DOI or similar identifier
Capture information easily from articles published without
DOI
21. Altmetrics will never present the full picture or provide the entire
answer – they are additional information to supplement your decision-
making process
Which altmetrics you use/are valuable varies depending on the objective
of each research project
Numbers provide a hint about where to look, the qualitative information is
where the value lies
As this gap has become wider, funders are now noticing that judging impact of research funded by them requires new tools, and the monitoring of new platforms.
Need more evidence about attention their work is receiving
Is funding going towards engaging work?
What other areas are getting traction within alternative metrics?
What are particular other funders getting traction with?
Can new avenues for funding be approached, or engaged with?
Not only that, but impact factors and citation counts are very laggy.
Take several years to accrue
-Don’t tell the whole story
Provide only part of the impact profile of your research
Because there are certain kinds of things that require metrics where traditional metrics fall short
We track attention NOT impact! We cannot tell you if work is good or bad but rather we give you the fully auditable details so you can tell that story.
So what is the donut?
Overview designed to give a rapid, compelling impression of the type of coverage experienced by the various platforms.
Point out the three major contributors
The donut never tells you quality It measure attention.
A high number or low number – as well as the colors around the donut – only make sense within a deeper dive into the data that altmetric provides
You need the whole story. Reliance on the number is not enough. Altmetrics are ultimately about context. Context is not just how many citations and IF (althought that’s important) but who’s reading, where are they reading, why are they reading, what conversations are they generating and how is that forwarding the science?
If we navigate to Explore Your Institution we can then navigate the institutional data by Author, by Department, or by journal subject, which we enrich using the ERA data from Australia. If we select an author, or a department, we are sent to a new summary page like the institutional one we saw at the beginning. We can save these views as Workspaces – and set up alerts on a daily or weekly basis, which I will do in a moment,
Finally The custom groups tab also allows you to load collections of identifiers and create a collection of items which will immediately show any mentions that have been found for these items in the entire Altmetric dataset we have collected so far.