Profile

Neuroscience-focused, biopharmaceutical company dedicated to discovering, developing, and delivering life-changing treatments for people with challenging and under-addressed neurological, endocrine, and psychiatric disorders.

For nearly three decades, the company has specialized in FDA-approved treatments for tardive dyskinesia, Parkinson’s disease, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, and clinical programs in multiple therapeutic areas.

Objectives

Most pharmaceutical companies, including this example, traditionally relied upon bibliometrics like Journal Impact Factor, H-index, and citation analysis to make key choices about publication planning and inform research strategies.

As the company grew and the healthcare landscape changed, they recognized a need to enhance their strategic planning through a better understanding of their online influence in specific therapeutic areas and their position in the wider healthcare community.

Altmetric offered a custom solution that would deliver the powerful insights needed, allowing them to measure influence in real-time as well as over longer periods.

Our solution helped them to address the following objectives:

• The need to enhance their strategic planning by obtaining a better understanding of their influence in specific therapeutic areas and their position in the wider healthcare community.
• Greater qualitative insight into their publications to show the impact of their contribution
• Plan a cohesive strategy for conferences and publications about TD, strategically selecting the right journals and engaging the most influential individuals to extend their reach and allow them to educate in the digital sphere.

Global influencing: how altmetrics helped shape tardive dyskinesia research

Alternative metrics (Altmetrics) played a crucial role in shaping research in the targeted area of therapeutics. By providing real-time insights and qualitative data on publication impact, Altmetric illuminated the company’s global reach and positioning. This enabled the company to optimize their strategies effectively and secure funding for future research initiatives.

By offering access to insights and attitudes surrounding their publications, Altmetric demonstrated the breadth of the research impact and showed how their circle of influence grew as the business matured.

The article-level subject classifications allowed benchmarking against competitors and helped them understand how and when others communicated. It also helped them understand more about their competitor’s successes and struggles.

The information provided in the Altmetric report facilitated the creation of visualizations to demonstrate impact and audience insight, helping them secure budgets for future research. Altmetric enabled an easier route to a cohesive strategy for conferences and publications about TD, strategically selecting the right journals and engaging the most influential individuals to extend reach and allow education in the digital sphere.

Staying one step ahead

The benefits of a wider range of metrics are clear. Real-time data informs medical strategy, enabling a better understanding of influence, audience engagement, and stakeholder interactions. Altmetric provides a high-level view of the playing field, allowing quick adaptation and action. Cutting through to the truth, Altmetric empowers efficient decision-making.

For more information on how Altmetric can help you prove impact, showcase success, and the influence of your work, get in touch for a demo.

The post Shaping the Future of Neuroscience: A Case Study in Altmetrics appeared first on Altmetric.

“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.”

Bethanne Wilson, Director of Journal Business and Operations

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.”

The post Radiological Society of North America appeared first on Altmetric.

“There are many reasons for choosing the Altmetric Explorer, and for us, it was about successfully tracking institutions’ societal impact.”

Veliswa Tshetsha, senior coordinator for open scholarships

We spoke to Veliswa Tshetsha, the Senior Coordinator for Open Scholarships at the Scholarly Communications Unit at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She specializes in coordinating open scholarship activities, including open access, research data management, repository management, metadata issues, copyright and open access advice, and academic research impact services.

She is responsible for supporting researchers in achieving research impact and research assessments as well as measuring the academic impact of the university’s research outputs, which include publishing, dissemination, and promotion.

Background

The University of Pretoria aims to support researchers in improving research impact and research assessments while measuring the academic impact of their research outputs. This includes publishing, dissemination, and promotion. It also strives to improve research visibility and the impact of researchers and the university’s global rankings. To evaluate research quality, the university library has used global bibliometric data sources such as Scopus and Web of Science to pull reports.

Challenges

Although it was relatively easy to pull bibliometric data from Scopus, Web of Science, and other profiling tools, one of the biggest challenges for the university was pulling alternative metrics data such as policy, patents, news, tweets, blogs, and more. Before subscribing to Altmetric Explorer, their process was quite time-consuming, capturing publication-level metrics manually using an Excel spreadsheet.

Two other intertwined challenges needed attention: the ranking of the university due to inadequate research visibility and impact strategy, and the lack of monitoring tools to monitor and track the attention received by UP’s scholarly works. The monitoring tool would inform the university with data and suggest the best marketing strategies to improve the dissemination of research outputs.

“Before subscribing to Altmetric Explorer we used to capture publication level metrics manually using an Excel spreadsheet which was a time-consuming process.”

Solution

Keeping the above challenges in mind, the University of Pretoria set up a project aimed at enhancing the visibility and impact of its research output by integrating its institutional repository (DSpace) into the Altmetric Explorer.

To achieve this objective, the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (NAS) initiated the integration of the Altmetric Explorer with their research publications from DSpace. The Department of Library Services (DLS) and NAS worked together to manage and administer DSpace and integrate it with Explorer. With support from Michelle Herbert, the Engagement Manager at Altmetric, the process began.

Bringing other stakeholders on board

The DLS embarked on roadshows to advocate and raise awareness of the Altmetric Explorer and DSpace among various stakeholders, including the Department of Institutional Planning, the Department of Institutional Advancement, the Department of Research and Innovation, the Deputy Vice-Principal, Deputy Deans, and various faculties. Altmetric training sessions were also organized including webinars, live demos, and presentations, to educate stakeholders on the integration of Altmetric and DSpace.

Results of the Altmetric integration

The integration of the Altmetric Explorer with DSpace data enabled the tracking and collection of mentions from various sources, including news and blogs, policy and patents, academic sources, social media, and others. To date, the Explorer has tracked 69,631 outputs from the institutional repository. The Department of Library Services (DLS) produced shareable and detailed reports for individual researchers, departments, faculties, and the institution. Altmetric reports were used to support researchers and produce detailed reports for the National Research Foundation (NRF) rating process, faculty promotion and tenure, the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (NAS) quinquennial review and the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

Other faculty use cases

• The Faculty of Humanities included the shareable and detailed reports produced using Altmetric Explorer in their Quinquennial Review (QQR).
• The EMS used the Explorer in the mock review/pre-submission grant review to prepare for the AACSB accreditation. The Deputy Dean requested Altmetric reports for EMS for the last five years until July 2022 to present an overview of the EMS’s research output and its wider impact.
• The NAS used Altmetric Explorer to obtain data for the research outputs of the faculty, departments, and individual authors. Altmetric reports were also used to report on the impact of NAS research outputs for their quinquennial review, to align and monitor the effectiveness of the NAS integrated marketing and communication plan, for the rollout to departments for reporting and planning, and to assess the departmental level impact and areas of strengths. Shareable and detailed reports were created for the faculty, its departments, and individual researchers.

The uptake of Altmetric Explorer after live demos

By holding live demonstrations of the Explorer, we were able to see usage from the following departments:

• The Department of Research and Innovation (DRI) to track, monitor and report on publicly funded research outputs.
• The Department of Institutional Planning (DIP) measures uptake by faculties, benchmarking with other institutions to identify similar mentions, tracking performance indicators for faculties and the institution, and monitoring institutional data to assess its impact.
• The Department of Institutional Advancement (DIA) monitors online activity surrounding academic research.

The post University of Pretoria appeared first on Altmetric.

“To achieve the goals, it is of the utmost importance that research results do not stay hidden in the academic world, but are visible, perceived and used in a wider context.”

Agneta lindsten, librarian

Altmetric provides a “broader understanding of how scientific output is disseminated, read and used”. We spoke to Daniel Albertsson and Agneta Lindsten, librarians at The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

Background

The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) was founded in 1977 but its roots date back to the 18th century, having been formed from a combination of three long-standing colleges, the earliest of which was founded in 1775. Today, the university consists of the following faculties: Landscape Planning, Horticulture and Agricultural Sciences; Natural Resources and Agriculture Sciences; Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science; Forest Sciences.

Customer need

The future sustainability of the planet and the quality of human existence within a sustainable world is of critical importance to SLU.

SLU has a strong commitment to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs). SLU does this through its core activities of research and education, developing new knowledge and the capacity for applying that knowledge in the service of global sustainability.

The 2030 Agenda at SLU

In its policy for making a global contribution to the 2030 Agenda, SLU has focused its efforts on six areas that reflect the university’s mission and strengths:

• Climate change
• Food security
• Circular and biobased economy Biodiversity and ecosystems Global health
• Urban sustainability.

To demonstrate its work in these areas, SLU sought to establish a web presence or portal that directly connected the university’s research outcomes with the 2030 Agenda. This project was led by staff in the SLU University Library and involved manually curating a list of research publications categorised by the SDGs.

“SLU has extensive research and collaborations that contribute to sustainable development. The aim of our publication project was to map SLU’s publishing efforts against the Sustainable Development Goals (2030 Agenda), and to provide easy access to those publications; and through them, to provide useful information about research results and data that can help to achieve the goals,” said Daniel Albertsson, Librarian at SLU.

“A dashboard showing some analyses while giving direct access to the underlying data seemed to be an attractive, honest and transparent way to
display our results.”

Having curated their publications, the team at SLU also wanted to explore whether that research was having a wider impact.

Solution

SLU has used data from Altmetric Explorer to present a case for societal attention and impact of its research.

Altmetric Explorer enables users to search for up to 25,000 “scholarly identifiers” in published outputs. These can be chosen for many reasons, such as according to their alignment with specific SDGs.

Having made the connection between its published research and the SDGs, thanks to Altmetric the team has also been able to show the links between this work and news stories, social media, blogs, Wikipedia articles, policy documents and many other aspects of broader attention.

“Altmetrics offer a broader – and sometimes deeper – understanding of how scientific output is disseminated, read and used. They provide commenting news articles, comments in social media, and fulltext policy documents referring to the publications, which together give a number of angles of approach to understanding the public reach and impact of the research.”

SLU has also become the first university in the world to add Altmetric’s specialised application programming interface (API), which automatically updates the public reports available on SLU’s website. What started as an intensive, manual project for the SLU team is now being progressively automated.

The post The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences appeared first on Altmetric.

“Altmetric adds an additional and unique perspective to the reach and influence profile of a piece of research in the discipline and its engagement with the world outside of academia.”

gabrielle hayes, liaison librarian (science and engineering faculty)

User profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a major Australian university with a global outlook. Its research strengths are reflected in ten dedicated centres specialising in areas from robotics to healthcare transformation.

One of QUT’s key aspirations is to lead in open science and open scholarship; it seeks to maximise knowledge-sharing, locally and globally. In July 2020 its public-facing, open- access repository achieved the milestone of over 30 million downloads.

Objective

Gabrielle Hayes is a Liaison Librarian for the Science and Engineering Faculty (SEF). In her role supporting STEM researchers, she needed a way to demonstrate the influence and engagement of their publications alongside the traditional citation metrics.

It’s increasingly vital for research institutes to be able to do this – especially in Australia. There, the National Innovation Science Agenda (NISA) advises people to look beyond academic performance when they evaluate university research; they are also encouraged to consider non-academic influence and industry engagement.

QUT was already aware of Altmetric, which collects relevant mentions of research from social media sites, newspapers, policy documents, blogs, Wikipedia and more. The “Altmetric attention score and donut” can reveal a piece of research’s online attention and activity, and the university’s institutional repository had added the Altmetric widget to other metrics in its records of publications.

Altmetric Explorer reveals research reach and influence

But Gabrielle then discovered the extra capabilities of Altmetric Explorer. After setting up its monthly reporting, she soon saw a lot of activity on the publications in her areas – activity that her faculty researchers weren’t necessarily aware of.

Now, every month, Gabrielle turns the Altmetric Explorer data into a user-friendly slide with the title “Who’s Talking About [School Name]?” This reveals the five publications that have seen the most activity that month, and a summary of that activity. She shares this slide with the relevant Head of School and the Director of Research, who present it at the monthly School meeting and other Faculty forums.

Gabrielle explains: “Providing the SEF’s Schools with this information demonstrates how Altmetric data can be used to showcase a publication or an individual author; reveals a publication’s international reach; and allows them to see how “buzz” around a publication can appear weeks, months or years after it’s first published. These Altmetric reports have become an everyday part of the way the SEF Library Team supports the Faculty in promoting and tracking research influence.”

The service has been very well received by the Faculty. “Back when I began, many STEM people could be sceptical about the value of complementary metrics,” says Gabrielle. “But since providing them with Altmetric data, I’ve always received positive feedback as to its usefulness and value. While there’s a good range of other tools for analysing research influence, Altmetric adds an additional and unique perspective to the influence of a piece of research in the discipline and its engagement with the world outside academia.”

Bringing benefits to the wider organisation

Using Altmetric Explorer keeps the librarians up to speed with new citations. For example, just days after a government policy document was published, they discovered that it cited many SEF publications. They could immediately alert the authors, Directors of Research and Heads of School to an achievement that they were unaware of.

This added to the Library’s reputation as a proactive and knowledgeable partner in supporting research across the university. As a result, other university teams became interested in using Altmetric Explorer in their work.

“They were told about the Library’s apparent wizardry in this area by key Faculty staff impressed with our data and fast response,” explains Gabrielle. “We now work with the Faculty Communications team using Altmetric Explorer to promote the Faculty Research publications and achievements through all their channels and media. This collaboration has resulted in several projects that have brought great benefits to the organisation – and it came about as a direct result of the unique data that Altmetric Explorer can provide.”

The post Queensland University of Technology appeared first on Altmetric.

“Users can see past the numbers and see value in the content – this helps when showing what research engagement and impact is.”

elisha bignell, research outputs and impact librarian

Profile

For more than a century, the University of Queensland (UQ) has educated and worked with outstanding people to create positive change for society. UQ research has global impact and is delivered by an interdisciplinary community of more than 1500 researchers at six faculties, eight research institutes and 100+ research centers.

Objective

The Library team were looking for a way to tell a fuller story about the University’s research. With so much research being published, it is crucial to track – as far as possible – citations, use, and engagement.

The first use of Altmetric had come some years earlier from UQ’s library. Altmetric’s attention scores are shown on the landing page of the institutional research repository, UQ eSpace. In turn, the scores link to a details page that shows the research’s online attention and activity. Altmetric collects relevant mentions from social media sites, newspapers, policy documents, blogs, Wikipedia and elsewhere.

More recently, the University of Queensland had been searching for tools to help find evidence for the engagement and impact of UQ’s research. This has become more crucial for research institutes and schools across the globe, and particularly in Australia.

Implementing Altmetric Explorer to demonstrate research impact

The team was keen to find a solution which genuinely showed research engagement and impact. In evaluating Altmetric Explorer they were attracted to the design ethos of the interface, which encourages users to drill down into details underlying the attention score. The visuals, like the timelines and demographics, help users to see past raw numbers and to see value in the content.

The team also welcomed the ability to save searches, and to create and share visually appealing reports that update data automatically.

Measuring research performance

Altmetric Explorer’s reporting adds up to a powerful performance indicator for the faculties and research institutes. Demonstrating research impact is an increasingly important part of securing research grants and is helpful in identifying researchers and research activities with end-user outcomes.

Encouraging a strategic approach to improving research

Altmetric Explorer helps researchers – and the university as a whole – to plan strategically for even greater research engagement and impact. Reporting has been enhanced; instead of researchers needing to be encouraged to look at data, they now ask for frequent updates. Indeed, some reports are a regular agenda item on research committee meetings.

The university is planning to make even greater use of Altmetric Explorer in future, championing its use to the wider UQ community and rolling it out to still more units.

The information provides useful insights into how UQ research is shared globally, giving units some visibility of the reach and attention of their activities.

The post The University of Queensland appeared first on Altmetric.

“We wanted to balance highly quantitative citation-based bibliometrics with qualitative aspects of engagement and attention.”

dr abigail mcbirnie, bibliometrics advisor

Established in 1966, the University of Surrey is based in Guildford, UK. The university has three faculties: Arts and Social Sciences, Engineering and Physical Sciences, and Health and Medical Sciences.

Altmetric Explorer for Institutions was implemented by the Library and Learning Support Services at the University in September 2016 to help underpin a new, five-year research strategic plan. One aim of that plan is to “ensure that strategic decision making is informed by the use of internal and external evidence”. We spoke to Bibliometrics Advisor Dr Abigail McBirnie about how it is helping them achieve their research and teaching goals.

Key stats

• 48,710 mentions of Surrey research to date
• Close to 26,000 research outputs in the Explorer – 1,300 of which are books
• 955 references from public policy sources Featured in over 3,700 news stories
• Nearly 900 mentions in the last month alone

Introduction of Explorer for Institutions

As a Bibliometrics Advisor, Abigail undertakes a range of activities to help the University achieve its strategic goals. Examples include profiling the University’s research outputs and working to embed analytics around those outputs into strategic decision making and business processes.

Vital to this is working alongside colleagues to promote a culture change, raising awareness of and championing analytics as a practical tool that administrators and faculty can use to explore the research landscape in order to position the University’s research as effectively as possible within it.

Although still a relatively new addition to the University’s analytics arsenal, the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions is already proving its worth in providing data and analytics capability not available through other research intelligence tools. The Explorer allows different and multiple perspectives on the attention and activity around research outputs.

The University has a well-established bibliometrics service. By bringing in Explorer for Institutions, Abigail and her Library colleagues sought to balance the highly-quantitative, citation-based approaches traditional to bibliometrics with opportunities to look at qualitative aspects of engagement, impact, and attention relating to research outputs. The newly-implemented Altmetric tool provides a systematic and transparent way of presenting qualitative data.

Abigail and her colleagues also wanted a way to overview easily how research outputs were being received in the online environment. This had previously been challenging for Abigail and her colleagues: in the vastness of the online space, they were unsure of where exactly to focus their analyses. Using the Explorer, they can now quickly highlight specific areas of engagement for University of Surrey research, explore altmetric data for peer institutions, and seek new and exciting collaborative opportunities.

They can also compare how their outputs are performing individually and at a departmental or institutional level against research outputs globally.

Implemeting Explorer for Institutions

Working in partnership Abigail and Altmetric were able to deal with the few unexpected issues discovered and very quickly achieved a successful implementation and roll-out of the solution. Staff on campus at Guildford can access the Explorer via the University’s IP range and users off campus can sign in using their institutional email address.

As part of the implementation, data from the University’s E-prints repository were imported into the Explorer. Only a few tweaks were required, such as exposing the departmental hierarchy to Altmetric via the open data feed. The University also recently completed a project to import unique author IDs into the repository, and the plan now is to feed these through to Altmetric to enhance the author search capabilities within the Explorer.

Using the Explorer for Institutions for collection management

As well as using the Explorer for research intelligence and analysis purposes, experience at the University of Surrey has also shown how the tool can be used to support teaching. Abigail was asked to assist a Faculty Engagement Librarian who, in the context of frequent requests from faculty for journals for teaching purposes, needed to ensure that the budget was spent efficiently. In particular, the librarian wanted to find systematic data to evidence decisions for acquiring specific journals. Abigail and the librarian looked at bibliometrics for each of the journals at both the journal and article level and also analysed the corresponding altmetric data.

The benefit of looking at the altmetric data was that it highlighted the journals that had a larger online presence with a higher number of articles available online, meaning they were more easily accessible to students.

Within the Explorer, Abigail and her library colleague used the ‘Journals and Collections’ tab, which gives a breakdown of the number of mentions for each journal and article from each online source. The tab features the ability to search for a specific group of journals and to sort by highest to lowest number of online mentions.

The number of mentions and the additional qualitative data in the Explorer helped to provide information about how each journal was being ‘seen’ online, thus contributing to more informed purchasing decisions on the part of the library.

Summary

Explorer for Institutions offers the University of Surrey an alternative perspective on its own research and that of others, allowing more complex profiling of research outputs and providing additional options to balance traditional bibliometrics approaches.

In Surrey’s case, the Explorer was straightforward to implement but Abigail recommends that institutions thinking of subscribing should make sure the data they need to feed into the Explorer are in the best condition possible.

Although it’s still very early days for the University of Surrey, Abigail and her colleagues are using the Explorer for Institutions in a variety of ways and are excited by the insights they are able to gain.

The post University of Surrey appeared first on Altmetric.

“We cannot only find and share their work more effectively amongst those audiences, but also measure the outcomes of that activity, and quantify the potential influence of the research.”

catherine sullivan, head of operations

Hosting about 3,000 undergraduate students and running a small postgraduate school (made up mainly of PhD students), RCSI is an Irish University of Medicine that focuses on areas of medicine, pharmacy and physiotherapy.

The university produces a lot of high impact research, and indeed this has become an increasing focus over the last 5 years. As a research intensive organization, the university has made efforts to invest in recruitment at all levels to support this, and ensured that research time is protected.

With a goal to be in the Top 200 of the Times Higher Education global rankings, the university has made big progress in recent years – and was recently ranked number one in the world for research that focuses on Health and Wellbeing, the 3rd UN Sustainable Development Goal. This is partly reflected in the close ties and collaboration that the university has with the local and more international health services, working alongside frontline staff in different regions.

We spoke with Head of Operations, Catherine Sullivan, from the university’s Institutional Research and Planning team, where they have been amongst the first to use Altmetric.

Key stats

• RCSI is a research intensive university, aiming to be in the Top 200 of the Times Higher Education Global Rankings
• Adopted Altmetric to track and help them build strategies to maximise the dissemination of outputs
• See the data as central to providing their researchers with more evidence and increasing understanding of the outcomes of their research

Altmetric as an indicator of reach and influence

RCSI adopted the Altmetric Explorer in 2019, making it available first within the research office. A lot of their decision to do was driven by what Catherine described as the ‘changing culture’ of research – their recognition of the need to disseminate their scholarly work more broadly, and to reach new audiences.

In using Altmetric, Catherine says, they can not only find and share their work more effectively amongst those audiences, but also measure the outcomes of that activity, and quantify the potential influence of the research.

Practical applications of the data

To date, Catherine notes, they have been using the Explorer at a fairly basic level – checking the attention data for certain papers, or at the departmental level.

If they find something that looks interesting (a piece of research they weren’t aware of that seems to be worth promoting more broadly, for instance) they’ll run an outreach campaign around the research and then check to see what difference in the level of engagement this has made.

Although they don’t currently share the results with the departments and researchers, Catherine says they would like to in future.

Along with this focus on individual pieces of research, Catherine says she can see big potential for the use of Altmetric data in the annual reports that they deliver to their departments on their research output, both at the departmental and individual level.

In doing so, she says, they’d hope to introduce their faculty to altmetrics as a complementary measure to citations, which can help them demonstrate the value and potential impacts of their work to internal management and external review bodies.

The post RCSI appeared first on Altmetric.

“The ability to find mentions in public policy and benchmarking against other publications in the field is really useful when applying for research funding.”

The bip team

About the Institution

Established in 1991, the University of South Australia (UniSA) is a relatively young university that consistently ranks in the top 50 of institutions in the world aged under 50 years. The faculty produce high-quality research across many disciplines, and the institution is constantly looking for opportunities to raise the profile of their expertise.

The Business Intelligence and Planning (BIP) team report to the Vice-Chancellor and are responsible for research performance monitoring and other reports and analysis to senior management. Within the group there is a specialist research performance monitoring team, analysts and a technical team – the work undertaken by the group is high-profile and strategic.

We spoke to members of BIP, to find out what got them interested in Altmetrics and how they have been using the data.

Getting started

Through its involvement in national research excellence exercises, the team in BIP were interested in exploring Altmetrics to not only enhance existing performance reports, but also to inform communications, marketing and applications aligned to research. Being a young institution, UniSA’s research was sometimes underrepresented by traditional bibliometric indicators (such as citations) and they wanted to find new ways to evidence their successes. They were careful not to conflate ‘quality’ with ‘attention’, and hoped to get a better understanding of how their research was perceived by communities beyond academia – something that the wide variety of attention sources tracked by Altmetric is particularly useful for.

Current applications

The Altmetric data made available via the Explorer for Institutions platform and the associated API have already been used in a number of ways across UniSA. The BIP team working collaboratively with the Library unit, have been experimenting with incorporating the data into their strategic reporting, often including visuals and examples of particular successes or noticeable changes in specific fields.

They have also begun embedding the Altmetric ‘donuts’ for each research application in staff performance reports – giving faculty something beyond citations (which often are not available for recently published work) and researcher-based indicators (such as the h-index) to discuss with their supervisors.

Doing so means they can have conversations that take into account the most recent work a researcher has produced, and not just the after-effects of something that may have been published a year or two before.

Researchers have been encouraged to look at and, where appropriate, include some examples from the altmetrics for their work in funding applications.

The data has also been incorporated into the system that is used when making promotion and tenure decisions, to provide decision makers with additional context on the broader engagement and potential impacts of a researcher’s work.

Attracting new talent and showcasing success

Central to the strategy of UniSA is a drive to showcase the expertise of their existing faculty and attract new talent from around the world to help grow the reputation of the institution. They’re also keen to identify rising stars amongst their existing staff, and to encourage those people to continue to showcase their work and educate others on best practice.

As part of these efforts the BIP, Library, Marketing and Research units of the organisation use Explorer for Institutions to find researchers who were doing a good job of engaging with external audiences.

These researchers were then invited by the marketing team to participate in their ‘talking papers’ video series – a great way to showcase a more diverse group than would’ve been identified via traditional scholarly indicators (i.e. those researchers whose work had received the most citations – typically more established staff in a narrow range of disciplines).

Collaboration with the Library

The Library have been central to the success of the roll-out of Explorer for Institutions at UniSA. They have run workshops, including information on Altmetrics in induction sessions, and targeted key researchers who were already active in outreach to introduce them to Altmetrics and encourage them to spread the word to others.

Library staff have encouraged top researchers to include significant Altmetrics results in national competitive grant applications. Additionally they have promoted the use of Altmetrics on the institution’s Research Outputs Repository.

Where next?

UniSA will continue to foster Altmetrics across the institution and within its own network. The Australian Technology Network, which UniSA is a member, will explore a whole-of-ATN instance of Altmetrics during 2016.

The objective, internally and externally, is to continue to analyse Altmetrics results to help shape marketing, communications and to showcase engagement activities.

With a national research performance framework focussed on engagement and impact, Altmetrics could provide useful insight. Altmetrics provides an ‘attention indicator’ beyond that of traditional metrics – it begins to connect a broader group of constituents with research outputs, i.e. beyond academia. This activity will highlight thought-leaders who may be at the forefront of engagement, thereby providing institutions like UniSA with early insight on the power of their research.

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