As a result, we will be implementing a series of five extended maintenance windows in March. Each maintenance window will take place on a Wednesday, with the first one scheduled for March 1, 2023, and the last one scheduled for March 29, 2023. All maintenance windows will be held from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM.

We understand that these maintenance windows may cause some inconvenience, which is why we want to provide as much information as possible to help you plan accordingly. 

The products that will be affected by these maintenance windows include the:

• Altmetric Explorer
• Explorer API
• Altmetric Detail Pages
• Details Page API
• Altmetric website

We will provide additional details on the day where appropriate, you can also track the migration process.

Please note that our helpdesk and support site will be unaffected by these changes.

While the risk of extended downtime is low, the risk of brief interruptions to product availability and functionality is considered medium to high. We want to assure you that we will be putting all the necessary measures in place to prevent data loss, and we have rollback plans in place where appropriate.

We understand that the scheduled maintenance windows may cause some inconvenience and we apologize in advance for any resulting disruption. It’s important to us to complete this project with minimal impact on our customers, and we want to assure you that we’re taking all possible measures toward this end.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your patience and understanding during this period of transition. If you have any questions or concerns about the maintenance windows, please do not hesitate to contact us via support@altmetric.com.

The post We’re migrating to the cloud appeared first on Altmetric.

Share of Scientific Voice 

For several years Digital Science, using Altmetric data, have been working on Scientific Share of Voice (SSoV) to tackle difficulties medical affairs teams have in tracking how research is being used and what products may be being used in research.

Altmetric provides data about where research and clinical trials are being shared, in social media, in policy documents and so on. However, until the last few years, it wasn’t being presented in a way that would make sense to medical affairs professionals. 

In their recent catch up, Mike and Carlos, speak to Garth from MAPS about how by closely working with medical affairs professionals they have been able to create bespoke dashboards. These dashboards allow med affairs professionals to easily benchmark, see what works and what doesn’t, and measure activity on Twitter. 

The ideas for these dashboards came directly from medical affairs.

Going beyond the numbers

Coming from the clinical community, Carlos speaks about his own experience in the importance of engaging with different stakeholder groups, which became even more crucial with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Carlos and his team were able to implement their research in less than a month, which would not have been possible without engaging with stakeholders. 

What else was important? To see how the research was being used, such as how it was impacting policy. It can take years to see research be implemented into guidelines for example, or to be used by clinicians. However, what can be seen quickly is how people are tweeting about the research. This is where Share of Voice comes in. 

Demonstrating the real-world impact of Share of Voice

Share of Voice is increasingly about ensuring that healthcare professionals (HCPs) are aware of the value of products. Published documents may receive audiences in high profile journals, but that is just the starting point towards the endless march towards the hospital environment, where you are hoping the patient is getting the best treatment. And this is only going to happen when the diagnosing physician is aware of the research. 

Physicians get their information via multiple sources. What we’re doing is making all that data simpler, helping medical affairs professionals navigate the volume of data so they can see what did and did not work, from congresses to journals. 

Who is talking about your research?

As Scientific Share of Voice can be used to see who is talking about your research, it can be used to identify Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs). With our solutions we can harness the data from publications to discover emergent KOLs and DOLs, who for example, may have been tweeting a lot about particular research. Using machine learning we can look at matching the two – DOLs who are also KOLs.

Listen to the podcast now

The post Share of Voice: understanding how your research is reaching a real-world audience appeared first on Altmetric.

Over the past three months, Altmetric has been watching the situation at Twitter with interest. As this is an attention source that is important to our customers, we wanted to go beyond the anecdotal evidence and understand how Twitter use has evolved over the years. We are lucky to have a huge database of historical twitter data, nearly 400 million tweets both with and without mentions of academic research. Using this data, we looked across the last five years to understand the ways in which the conversation on Twitter has changed. We discovered that since 2018 there have been huge changes in how scientific research is socialized and discussed, but not in the ways you may expect.

The most talked about topic on Twitter today is Twitter. Since November, people have announced their exit from the platform, or a shift in focus to prioritize a different platform. People are asking the world, and us personally, if Twitter is “dying”. In asking the data, the answer is – not in a way that is observable. We have sliced the data by volume, by subject area, by demographic and by virality, and by all measures we are seeing similar levels of activity to those observed throughout 2021 and 2022, and much, much higher levels than 2019 and earlier.

Twitter and COVID

I started as Director of Product for Altmetric in April 2020. Starting a new job is always scary, but starting a new job while you are locked in your house thanks to a global pandemic definitely adds a new level of complexity. Nevertheless, I was excited to get to grips with a new domain and a new set of customer problems to solve.

Shortly before I joined, a report was published by Imperial College London called “Report 9: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand”. This report became one of the first big “talking point” papers of the pandemic, used both by people who wanted to stress the potential risks of letting COVID spread, but also by people who believed it was evidence of COVID being “fake news”.

Prior to this report being published, the highest all-time Altmetric Attention Score for a research output was for A paper on neural networks, with a score of 11,194. Twitter made up a large amount of the attention that study had received, with over 56,000 tweets. The Altmetric Attention Score for the Imperial report is 55,806 at time of writing, and the paper has been mentioned (i.e. linked to) from 145,000 tweets. At its peak, the Imperial report had an Attention Score of nearly 63,000, but saw a precipitous drop thanks to the introduction of Twitter’s COVID misinformation policy and the subsequent removal of tens of thousands of accounts (and their associated tweets).

We saw this increase in attention to scholarly research reflected across all disciplines, but particularly in the biomedical and health sciences. All in all, we went from collecting 1.9 million tweets a month to over 3 million a month.

What is even more interesting is where the increase in attention was coming from. While Twitter activity greatly increased across the board, the largest increase was seen amongst users who are not in the academic domain at all. Prior to March 2020, the Twitter profiles we saw mentioning research consisted of roughly 66% “uncategorised” users, which is users that are not considered a part of the medical, academic or research communities (you can learn more about our approach to identifying demographics in this webinar). This has increased to 71%, with biomedical sciences in particular increasing even further to 82%.

Initially we expected this to be a temporary state, calming down to the prior levels once the world had developed a deeper understanding of the pandemic, and the general public became more informed. However, it now appears that this change in scientific discourse is permanent.

Twitter’s changed landscape

In the midst of the pandemic, it was almost impossible to take the time to reflect on just how profound an effect it was having on the scientific literacy of the general public. However, with recent events causing people to wonder about the future of Twitter, and whether it still contributes to the public discourse in the way it once did, we wanted to look at a broader horizon to understand if the community perception of the platform was reflected in the data.

Before 2020, your average internet denizen would be a step removed from the research, instead relying on the work of science communicators and journalists to find and translate important research into understandable insights. Prior to the pandemic, there was already a trend towards improving access to research. The push towards Open Access, the introduction of intuitive platforms like Dimensions Analytics, and the increased popularity of preprint servers meant that people could get their research in front of vastly more people, far faster than was possible by going the traditional peer review route. These improvements, alongside an unstable macro-level environment with confusing, conflicting rules, lead to people trying to find their own answers that supported their argument.

While this increase in overall awareness of current research has been good in some ways, it has been increasingly damaging in others. The “bubble” around academic Twitter has effectively popped, meaning that the work of an academic can make a larger impact, but also draw much more potentially negative attention. It also increases the likelihood of academic output being misinterpreted or misunderstood, especially in cases where people are sharing preprints without an understanding of the differences in peer review between these and published works.

Nowhere is this new trend more evident than in the attention for a July 2021 paper from the American Journal of Therapeutics. The paper, about the efficacy of the drug Ivermectin in fighting COVID-19, immediately became a hot button topic worldwide. Ivermectin was a controversial option in treating the symptoms of COVID, and while some tweeters mentioned the paper to argue the point that the treatment works, far more used it as evidence of a greater conspiracy connected to the pandemic.

The reaction to this paper was so immediate that the spike it caused is perceivable even when looking across the data for the whole year. When broken down by demographic, the effect is even more extreme. This kind of network effect was never observed prior to 2020, and is very much an artifact of how much more engaged the general public is in our scientific work.

Twitter in the Future

Taking a longer term view, Twitter data has never been more interesting. Academia is facing a number of reckonings, from the OSTP Open Access announcement, to the rise of systemic plagiarism and the emergence of AI authorship. The general public have made their way into the academic echo chamber, and while those fresh eyes have brought a lot of misinterpretations and confusion, they also offer a unique perspective into the value of modern academic research.

The future of Twitter is still uncertain, though probably no more or less uncertain than in any social media platform in today’s macroeconomic climate. However, the data in aggregate shows that Twitter still has huge value as a platform, and it still has a long way to fall before we would be back at the activity levels of the real “Old Twitter”, which for us is Twitter before the pandemic. Even if the platform were to disappear tomorrow, the stories that our historical Twitter data tells can help inform publications and research strategy far beyond social media, and help us learn how our work can have impact beyond the academic sphere. 

You can learn more about exploring Altmetric’s social media data in this webinar.

The post Twitter and the Changing Research Conversation appeared first on Altmetric.

We’ve published a report in collaboration with Dimensions that investigates plastic pollution in our oceans and its related research. In the report, we use Altmetric data to find out how research on the topic has been disseminated and discussed online, and the potential impact this coverage may have. 

To learn more, read the full report now.

The post New report: ‘Plastics in our oceans: what research is doing to help’ appeared first on Altmetric.

If you care about the real-world impact of a piece of research, a reference in a report by the World Health Organisation or an African Union proceedings is a gold mine. Altmetric tracks policy sources that range from UN organizations to small local think tanks. We are constantly adding new sources to our tracking. Since the beginning of 2020 our policy database has grown from 83 major sources and 23 countries up to 514 sources from 60 countries at the time of this writing – and counting!

How new sources are added

In order to add a new policy source a developer writes a custom scraper that retrieves all of the relevant PDFs or HTML documents from a location like the World Health Organisation’s publications list. From there, we extract the full text and key metadata from the document and search for links and publication identifiers that we can match with articles, books, data sets, and other research outputs. Finally, since many policy reports contain full reference lists (and not necessarily links or identifiers), Altmetric tries to match references with article metadata from Crossref. Our goal is to accurately match as many references as we can from policy documents.

Our ever-expanding list of policy sources

Over the past year, Altmetric has focused heavily on growing our policy database in a way that emphasizes global coverage.

In the past few years, we have built our sources base and now we cover roughly 30% of the world’s countries, collecting attention from over 514 distinct policy sources. 

We have expanded our base to cover sources from the USA, Canada, and Australia and in 2022, we have added our first policy source in Ukraine with the Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research (UCIPR), as well as welcoming the Government of Greenland to our policy coverage.

This and other efforts have greatly improved our global policy coverage but there is still more ground to cover. Below is the map of Altmetric’s policy attention at the beginning of 2020:

This is the map today (January 2023):

Improving our global policy coverage is an ongoing priority at Altmetric. Stay tuned for more updates in 2023.

The post How Altmetric has increased policy tracking in 2022 appeared first on Altmetric.