What are FoR codes?

First, what are FoR codes? FoR stands for Fields of Research. The Fields of Research (FoR) classification is a component of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification system, which you can read more about on their website. Altmetric gets this data from Dimensions, which is one of our companion products. Codes are automatically assigned using an algorithm, and are assigned at the level of the publication, i.e. the classification of the journal in which the output was published is not taken into account unless the algorithm does not have enough data. The FoR system is hierarchical, with major fields subdivided into minor fields. Visit Dimension’s Fields of Research page to learn more about the hierarchy and to view the codes you can use to search in Altmetric Explorer. Here is an example structure for one subject area:

07 Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences

• 0701 Agriculture, Land and Farm Management
• 0702 Animal Production
• 0703 Crop and Pasture Production
• 0704 Fisheries Sciences
• 0705 Forestry Sciences
• 0706 Horticultural Production 
• 0707 Veterinary Sciences
• 0799 Other Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences

Using FoR codes in Altmetric Explorer

In Altmetric Explorer, you have the ability to search by subject area using FoR codes. To open the advanced search, click the blue edit search button at the top of your screen. Please note that your advanced search layout may be slightly different—it depends on your organization’s subscription. If your organization has a custom data integration, you’ll see two tick boxes in the upper right corner. If you’d like to do a landscape analysis or compare to another institution, i.e. search beyond your organization’s research, make sure the full Altmetric database box is ticked. If you don’t see these boxes, don’t worry, that simply means that your default view is the full database. 

In the advanced search, you’ll see that one of the search filters is labeled SUBJECTS (FOR CLASSIFICATION). This is the filter you will use. If you know the code you’d like to search, you can type in the number. Otherwise, you can start typing in a word and suggestions will auto-populate. You can choose to search more than one FoR code at a time—these will automatically be ORed together. There is no AND function at this time. For these broad searches, you will probably want to put a publication date limit on your search as well. You can limit by date at the bottom of the advanced search screen. Remember, you can also put additional limits on your search such as searching for your peer institutions in the AFFILIATION (GRID) filter, or searching by publisher or journal title. 

If you navigate to the Research Outputs tab, and view the results as a list, on the right side of the screen you’ll see the FoR codes assigned to each output. In this case, 0707 Veterinary Sciences should appear on all of them. This code’s “parent” code will also appear, i.e. 07 Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences.

Now, you can use the tabs in Altmetric Explorer to answer questions such as:

• Where in the world are people talking about veterinary research the most? 
• • Use the Demographics tab to view heatmaps for Twitter, Facebook, News, and Policy.
• What news sources are talking about veterinary research? Should we target those for press releases?
• • Use the Mention Sources tab to easily see which news outlets mention this research the most. 
• Who are the Twitter influencers? Should you follow them and engage with them on Twitter?
• • In the Mention Sources tab, you can quickly see which Twitter accounts share this research often and how many followers they have. 
• What blogs should I be reading? Should I submit a guest blog post?

• You can also search by blogs in the Mention Sources tab, revealing which blogs are prolific in this area. 

To learn more about the functionality of the different tabs in Altmetric Explorer, consider reviewing one of our introductory guides:

• An Introductory Guide for Institutions
• An Introductory Guide for Publishers
• An Introductory Guide for Pharmaceutical Companies

In summary, FoR codes, or Fields of Research codes, cover areas of academic research at a high level and work well for non-granular landscape analyses or comparative analyses. If you would like to hear more about this, watch our webinar on ‘How to search by subject area’.

If you have any questions, please contact support@altmetric.com. 

The post How to: Search by subject area in Altmetric Explorer using FoR codes appeared first on Altmetric.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you’re searching the full Altmetric database. Depending on your organization’s subscription, you may have a custom data integration and your default view will only show your organization’s research outputs.  

Click the blue ‘edit search’ button on the top of your screen in Altmetric Explorer. If your organization has a custom data integration, you’ll see two tick boxes in the upper right corner. Make sure the ‘full Altmetric database’ box is ticked. If you don’t see these boxes, don’t worry, that simply means that your default view is the full database. Just make sure you don’t have any other filters or limits on your search. Click run search.

Now, navigate to the Mention Sources tab. This tab shows different sources Altmetric is tracking and the number of times they’ve mentioned research outputs. This tab is usually used to identify which tweeters, news outlets, etc. are sharing your research the most. But when you’re searching the full Altmetric database as opposed to a very specific search, you can use this tab to view all of the policy sources, news sources, blogs, and Facebook pages Altmetric is tracking. 

For example, limit to policy sources by hovering over ‘Add source’ and choosing policy, and then clicking ‘apply’. At the time this blog post was written (March 21, 2022), Altmetric was tracking 470 policy sources with over 2.8 million mentions. You can scroll through this list to see the variety of policy sources Altmetric tracks. But if you want to view this in a more readable format, you can download the results as a CSV file.

So once again, you can use this tip to see what news sources, policy sources, blogs, and Facebook pages Altmetric is tracking! If you have any questions, please contact support@altmetric.com.

The post How to: View the sources Altmetric is tracking appeared first on Altmetric.

The SDG data is provided to Altmetric by Dimensions, who have implemented automatic classification of publications by aligning them to the goals using supervised machine learning based on extensive training sets and curated keyword searches. While this process is constantly being improved, it is still not perfect! Keep in mind that not all publications are classified with an SDG. Visit Digital Science’s SDG classification page to learn more. 

Getting started is easy

Step-by-step guide

First, click the blue edit search button at the top of the screen in Explorer to access your advanced search. You’ll see Sustainable Development Goals as a search filter option.

Please note that the location of this filter may be in a slightly different location in your advanced search interface than the image below. The location depends on your organization’s subscription..

Now, you can search for a specific SDG by name or by number.  For example, if you type in water, you’ll  see the two SDGs with water in the title. Or you can search by an SDG’s number. You can search for more than one SDG at a time and they will be ‘ORed’ together in your search. Click run search to view your results.

Now you can see that there are over 51,000 outputs with attention that are classified with these two SDGs. If you navigate to the Research Outputs tab, and view the results as a list, you’ll see the SDG information on the right side of the screen.

Going back to the advanced search, you can try combining this filter with other search filters as well. For example, you can limit by publication date, search by journal title, or search for a specific company or institution, such as Harvard University. If you run the search pictured in the image below, you can view over 220 outputs from Harvard University classified with these two SDGs and explore the attention they are receiving online.

If you have any questions about how to use this feature in Altmetric Explorer, please contact our support team.

The post How to: Using the Sustainable Development Goals search filter in Altmetric Explorer appeared first on Altmetric.

• How to write about your research impact in a narrative format
• How to summarize attention using bullet points
• How to use altmetrics in reference lists

What is impact?

First, it is important to consider how you define impact. Impact is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean?  What does it mean to you? What does it mean to your boss? What does it mean to the organization funding your research? Unfortunately, a lot of people and organizations don’t have a set definition, but it’s good to think about, especially as more and more people are asked to create dissemination plans and plans to evaluate the impact of their work. 

Here are some different ways of categorizing impact and how Altmetric can help:

• Academic impact: many people use citations and citation-based metrics as proxies for academic impact. At Altmetric, we track Faculty Opinions and Publons. These online communities participate in post-publication peer review, which you can use to see how other experts in your field respond to your work. 
• Global impact: In Altmetric Explorer, you’ll see heatmaps of global attention for news, Twitter, Facebook, and policy sources. This can help you identify where in the world people are discussing your research. 
• Impact on innovation: Altmetric tracks mentions in patent applications. This can be really useful to see how your research is leading to new innovations!
• Impact on policy: You can also see where your work is being cited in policy documents and guidelines, which can help you make the case that your research is influencing real-world changes. 
• Impact on public discourse: At Altmetric, we also track social media sources Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. It can be very interesting to see these diverse and far-reaching conversations about your work!

One final, very important note about impact before jumping into some examples: Altmetric attention does not equal impact in and of itself. Rather, altmetrics can help you discover pathways to impact. Altmetric data comes in handy in space between the outputs and impact, and you can use Altmetric Explorer to help you gather evidence to underpin the impact and add to your narrative. Let’s take a closer look…

How to write about your impact in a narrative format

Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing your narrative:

• Use plain language; avoid jargon
• Add context when you can, e.g. in addition to listing the number of news outlets, give a bit more detail like which news outlets are sharing your work or what the headlines are
• Don’t use the Altmetric Attention Score unless you provide more context
• What kind of impact are you trying to describe?
  • Global impact – consider highlighting the number of countries your work has been shared in
  • Academic impact – consider highlighting post publication peer reviews
  • Public impact – look to news, social media, wikipedia, etc.

Example 1: Oral administration of morphine versus ibuprofen to manage postfracture pain in children: a randomized trial

If you click the link above, you’ll be taken to the Altmetric Details Page for this output where you’ll see all of the mentions this output has received online, including:

• 16 news mentions
• 2 policy mentions
• 125 twitter mentions

If I follow the links in the Details Page, I learn that this output has been mentioned in a guideline from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, as well as news stories by NPR and Reuters. How do I create a story about this attention? Here is one example:

“This work informed non-complex fracture guidelines from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence recommending that pediatric patients receive ibuprofen to manage mild to moderate pain. More broadly, this research has influenced conversations in mass media surrounding opioid addiction; it has also been described on social media as ‘practice changing’ research by clinicians and government officials, evidencing the dissemination of this work to audiences beyond academia.” 

Or here is a shorter version:

In addition to being cited 71 times, this paper has been mentioned in 16 news outlets including NPR and Reuters. It was also cited in the non-complex fracture guideline from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. 

Example 2: Randomized Trial of Peanut Consumption in Infants at Risk for Peanut Allergy

Again, if you click the link above you’ll see the Altmetric Details Page where you’ll discover that this output has led to changes in policy, changes in industry, and changes in clinical practice. Here is an example narrative impact statement:

“This work led to sweeping reversals on policy regarding introducing allergens to children. This work has also influenced public discourse on the topic, and the results have been shared widely on Twitter, clinicians’ Facebook pages, and mass media outlets including The New York Times and Washington Post, suggesting public awareness of this topic and translation to practice.”

How to summarize attention using bullet points

Oftentimes, you won’t have the space to write out a nice paragraph summarizing the impact of your work in a narrative format. Here are a variety of ways to incorporate altmetrics into short statements:

• Of my papers published in the last 10 years, 79% have received Altmetric attention.
• My work has been mentioned in 1,781 news stories in 45 countries, including:
  • 20 stories in the New York Times
  • 18 stories in The Conversation
  • 16 stories in BBC News
• My work has influenced 88 policy documents in 8 countries, including government organizations in:
  • United Kingdom
  • United States
  • Netherlands
  • Australia

• This paper was tweeted over 100 times in more than 15 countries, including by a women’s health center in South Africa that disseminates information to our target population.
• This paper is in the 95th percentile of all JAMA papers tracked by Altmetric.
• This publication has been tweeted over 3,100 times by over 2,550 users with an upper bound of 19 million followers.
• This publication has been tweeted in 73 countries, most frequently by tweeters in the US, Canada, and Japan. 
• The most prominent twitter accounts (by twitter follower count) to share this publication include MSNBC host Chris Hayes, Atul Gawande, White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain, and scientist Eric Topol.

How to use altmetrics in reference lists

You can also consider adding metrics to the end of your references. This is a space-saving way to sneak in some metrics when space is at a premium. You could do this on your CV or even in the reference list for a grant application. Here is an example (the added metrics are bolded): 

Reference List

1. Randomized Trial of Peanut Consumption in Infants at Risk for Peanut Allergy, NEJM, Feb 2015. 25705822. Q1 journal; RCR: 47; 377 news stories (WoS; Dimensions; Altmetric) 
2. Impact of peanut consumption in the LEAP Study: Feasibility, growth, and nutrition, The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, October 2016.  27297994. Q1 journal; 134 news stories, 7 patent mentions (WoS; Altmetric)
3. Association of Staphylococcus aureus colonization with food allergy occurs independently of eczema severity, The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, August 2019. 31160034. 61 news stories, 133 tweets (Altmetric)
4. Effect of Avoidance on Peanut Allergy after Early Peanut Consumption, NEJM, April 2016. 26942922. RCR 14; 7 patent mentions (Dimensions; Altmetric)

The above examples include both citation-based metrics (journal quartiles and the Relative Citation Ratio or RCR) and altmetrics. It is best practice to list where you got the information, e.g. Dimensions, Altmetric, etc. Learn more about different metrics using the Metrics Toolkit. 

Finally, you’ll notice that the Altmetric Attention Score is not used in any of these examples! The Altmetric Attention Score is an indicator that helps you pick out where your research is being mentioned online. However, the score alone does not provide additional important context like where these conversations are happening and who is talking about your work. The power of altmetrics lies in the details, so be sure to keep that in mind as you start writing impact statements of your own!

If you would like to learn more about these examples or how to use Altmetric tools and data, please contact support@altmetric.com. 

Discover key moments from our webinar here, or watch the full version here. 

The post How to: Write impact statements with Altmetric data appeared first on Altmetric.

Saving Searches

This first step to creating a shareable report is to save your search. With the click of a button, you can easily save any search you run in Altmetric Explorer. In the upper right corner of any tab in the database, you’ll see a blue ‘Save Search’ button. You can click this button at any time to save your search. To view your saved searches, click the icon with 3 lines on the toolbar on the left side of your screen. 

Creating and Customizing Shareable Reports

Create an easily shareable report for any saved search to highlight data of most value to your organization. Create a report by clicking on the blue document icon on a saved search. 

Clicking the blue icon will open a new screen. To customize the report, click the blue ‘Edit report’ button at the top of your screen. You can edit any segment with a pencil icon or delete any segment with a red ‘X’ icon. For example, consider editing the ‘Attention Over Time’ segment. This segment defaults to showing you all mentions from all time, but you can get more specific, e.g. you can limit to news mentions that occurred during the previous calendar year. To share the report, make sure you click the ‘Make public?’ tick box in the lower left corner and save your changes.

Now, you’ll see a blue ‘Share report’ button. Click this button to obtain a URL that you can share with your colleagues or other stakeholders.

You can share the URL with anyone. They do not have to have an Altmetric Explorer account to view the report. One more perk? This report is not just a snapshot in time. It will keep updating as new mentions keep occurring, making it easier to stay on top of the attention your research is receiving! 

If you’d like to learn about all of the alerting and reporting options in Explorer, check out this blog post and video.

If you have any questions or would like a demo of our tools, please contact support@altmetric.com.  

The post How to: Customize a shareable report appeared first on Altmetric.

You excitedly call your co-authors to share the news. That’s interesting! they say. Is that a lot of attention? How does it compare to other widget studies research? As you hang up the phone, you realise you need a basis of comparison in order to fully understand the significance of the engagement you’ve received. But where do you begin?

Benchmarking drives insight

“Benchmarking” is the practice of understanding your performance by comparing yourself to your peers, typically using metrics. In the world of research, those comparisons are usually made against competing institutions or journals, or even against entire subject areas, using citation-based metrics and other bibliometrics. Approaches to benchmarking altmetrics are not as widely known.

Benchmarking engagement using the Altmetric Attention Score in Context

It’s currently easy to understand the significance of the engagement that an article (or a group of articles) has received as a whole by looking at the Altmetric Attention Score’s percentile performance.

The Altmetric Attention Score is a weighted count of mentions that a research output receives in the sources that Altmetric tracks, based on the relative reach of each source. It gives a sense of the overall diffusion of a piece of research.

Altmetric compares an article’s Altmetric Attention Score against the Scores of other research published in the same journal within a three month window, to calculate an article’s percentile. We then share this percentile information in each article’s Altmetric Details Page to help you benchmark the performance of one article against similar articles:

“So far Altmetric has tracked 80,629 research outputs from this source [e.g. Nature]. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 91.2. This one has done well, scoring higher than 79% of its peers.”

You can check any article’s Altmetric Attention Score percentile on that article’s Altmetric Details Page “Score in Context” tab:

We think this approach works really well for understanding overall engagement for articles published in the journals we track.

But what about comparisons to an entire subject area? And what about benchmarking engagement in specific Altmetric data sources like the news or Facebook?

How to benchmark research against a subject area

Sometimes, you need to understand if research engagement for a group of articles is a lot (or not) compared to other research published in the same discipline. This takes journals out of the equation and allows for direct comparison to research on similar topics.

To start benchmarking, you’ll need to keep some important principles in mind when creating a comparison set.

Understand your subject areas

Databases like Dimensions assign subject areas at the article level. Other databases might assign subject areas to journals, and then consider any article published in that journal to conform to that subject area.

Some subject area frameworks are more precise than others. For example, second-level Field of Research codes (e.g. “Immunology”) are typically more granular than first-level codes (e.g. “Medical Sciences”).

Be informed about how subject areas are assigned in the database you’re using to create a comparison set, as that will affect the conclusions you can draw when making comparisons.

If your article is assigned to more than one subject area, you can compare your article against several comparison sets that reflect those same subject areas. Just take the average value in each subject area and then take the average of those averages to create a single number to benchmark against.

Get the sample size right

You should aim to have a reasonable set of randomly selected articles to compare against. Some researchers will use sets of a few hundred papers, some will use a few thousand. The higher set of numbers should mean the benchmark value is more reliable.

These should be articles published in the same time frame and same subject area.

If you want to get very precise, you can use a sample size calculator to determine how many articles you’d need to ensure that your comparison set is representative of an overall subject area.

Select similar outputs – time and type

Other important considerations for determining “similar” research for comparison are publication time frame and the type of output being compared.

The volume of attention that research receives can vary, depending on when it was published. In general, Altmetric has better coverage for research published January 2011 onward.

If you are benchmarking engagement in fast-moving data sources like social media, consider using a short time window for comparison. A two month window (i.e. comparing research published within one month before and one month after your research) is typically sufficient.

In slower engagement data sources like patent and policy documents, where it can take months or years to be cited, consider using a longer time window for comparison, up to two years.

You’ll also want to make sure you are comparing apples with apples, articles with articles. Altmetric tracks many different research output types. Engagement norms differ for these research formats. For example, researchers and the public share monographs and datasets at different rates than they share journal articles. So, be sure to limit your comparison set to similar output types.

Choose the right metric

There are two ways you can think about benchmarking your research: how often it’s been shared (counts) and what percentage of your research has been shared (coverage).

Counts

If you are trying to understand the relative influence of a single article in a specific Altmetric data source, we recommend using attention counts, contextualised by percentiles.

Percentiles can be a great way to understand if your research is receiving a lot of engagement, compared to all research in related subject areas.

An example of a percentile would be, “My article is in the top 5% of all climate change research published this year, in terms of number of mentions on Twitter.” As mentioned previously, Altmetric uses percentiles to contextualise the Altmetric Attention Score—albeit using other research published in the same journal as the comparison set.

Another example: if you know your nanotechnology article received 200 tweets, you can compare your article’s tweet count to tweet counts for other nanotechnology articles published within two months of your article:

Because your article’s tweet count is greater than tweet counts for 75% of similar research, you can say your article is in the 75th percentile (or “top 25%”).

Calculating percentiles is a snap in Excel, and it is also easy to implement in a few lines of R or Python code if you are so inclined.

You might ask, why not just use the mean (average) to make a comparison? We recommend avoiding the mean because Altmetric data can be highly skewed. Outliers like this COVID-19 report (shared on Twitter a stunning 162,752 times) can throw off the mean by a lot!

Coverage

If you are comparing groups of articles, sometimes it is useful to know what percentage of those articles has been shared at least once in a specific Altmetric data source.

For example, a journal editor might be interested to know what percentage of her journal’s research goes on to be cited in public policy, and how that compares to research published in her subject area overall.

To calculate coverage, first you will need an accurate sense of all research published in a set of articles—not only those articles that have been tracked by Altmetric. (Contrary to popular belief, we do not track all research ever published). Typically, you can get total publication count information from a citation database like Dimensions or Web of Science.

You can then use this complete list of publications to search Altmetric Explorer, to see how many of those publications were mentioned once or more in a specific Altmetric data source. To do so, in the Explorer Research Outputs tab, download mention counts for your article set, counting the number of articles mentioned once or more in each data source. Divide the “mentioned at least once” number for a data source by the total number of publications and you’ll get your coverage rate for that Altmetric data source.

You’ll need to calculate coverage rates twice: once for your own article set (e.g. all papers published by your journal) and again for your comparison set (e.g. all papers published in the same year, in the same subject area).

Here’s an example for how to visualise the relative coverage of a specific journal in Altmetric data sources, compared to the expected coverage for similar subject area research of the same age:

Expected coverage in each Altmetric data source is indicated in the above chart by black strike marks and observed coverage for that journal is illustrated using bars—making it easy to see where a journal has had “breakthrough” success. In the example above, the journal is clearly over-performing in terms of Twitter, blog, and Wikipedia coverage of its articles.

Get started

For more information, check out our webinar on journal benchmarking, led by Altmetric’s head of data insights, Mike Taylor.

Then, if you’re already an Altmetric Explorer subscriber, simply log into Explorer immediately to download data for benchmarking.

If you’re not yet an Altmetric Explorer subscriber and would like to learn more, get in touch! We’d love to discuss how you can use Altmetric Explorer to better understand your organisation’s research influence.

The post How to benchmark against a subject area appeared first on Altmetric.

When you login to Altmetric Explorer, you’ll quickly be able to see if your institution’s subscription includes a custom data integration. On the left side of the screen, you’ll see a building icon – this icon denotes that we have worked with your institution to reflect your author and department data. Click on the building icon to view your institution’s Authors and Departments. Authors are listed alphabetically; simply click on a person’s name to view their research outputs with Altmetric mentions. It’s as easy as that! 

Alternatively, navigating back to the homepage, you can type an author’s name in the Quick Search bar located in the upper right corner of the screen. Finally, you can also search by author in the Advanced Search. Click the blue ‘Edit Search’ button at the top of your screen to open the Advanced Search. In the upper left corner, you’ll be able to search for a ‘Verified Author’ or authors at your institution by typing in their name(s).

But what if you want to search for an author who doesn’t work at your institution? Or what if your company or organization doesn’t have a custom data integration? If that’s the case, you have 3 options:

1. Search by ORCiD
2. Search by Keyword and Affiliation
3. Search by Scholarly Identifier

Searching by ORCiD is quick and easy. Open the Advanced Search by clicking the blue ‘Edit Search’ button at the top of the screen. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a search box labeled ‘ORCiD’. Paste in an author’s ORCiD and run your search. Please note that you can only search one ORCiD at a time and the accuracy of the results is dependent on the author keeping their ORCiD profile up to date. 

Another option is to search by Keyword and Affiliation in the Advanced Search. In the ‘Keywords’ search box at the top of your advanced search screen, type in the author’s name. Next, type in their academic or professional affiliation in the ‘Affiliation (GRID)’ search bar. When you run your search, this will look for the author’s name in the author field of a publication and also search their academic/professional affiliation. Please note that this method may not give you comprehensive or fully accurate results, particularly if the author has a common name. 

Finally, you can also search by a group of Scholarly Identifiers. If you have a list of research outputs by an author, you can paste a list of the publications’ DOIs, ISBNs, PMIDs, etc., into the ‘Scholarly Identifiers’ section of the Advanced Search. You have the ability to paste up to 25,000 identifiers at a time. 

Bonus tip: there is one other way to search for an author’s outputs. This requires a Dimensions subscription. View this blog post for more information or watch this short video. 

Click here to view the video tutorial that accompanies this post.

The post How-to: Look up a specific person’s publications or research outputs? appeared first on Altmetric.

Altmetric can start tracking attention to your research as soon as it goes online! To ensure that Altmetric captures your mentions, it helps to understand how we track attention to research.

This diagram illustrates how Altmetric picks up mentions and links them with our details pages for individual publications:

1. A link to a published research output is shared on a platform that Altmetric tracks (such as Twitter)
2. If Altmetric tracks the domain being shared (like plos.org), our servers follow the link to the publication’s landing page
3. Altmetric’s scrapers look for a valid scholarly identifier on that page, such as a DOI, PubMed ID, or handle
4. Our database uses that identifier to match the mention with the publication’s Altmetric details page

To ensure that Altmetric captures the online attention to your research, follow these simple guidelines.

Make sure Altmetric tracks the platform where you’re sharing your research

Altmetric tracks news sources from all over the world, social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit, Wikipedia, over 14,000 blogs, and loads of other sources where research is frequently mentioned.

While some sources, like Twitter, are always tracked automatically, others are manually curated. Our data curation team adds new YouTube channels, blogs, news sources, and public Facebook pages every day.

Promoting your publication on a unique platform like your own YouTube channel or blog is a great way to foster conversations about your research.

If you have your own blog, public Facebook page, or YouTube channel where you would like to share your research and you’re not sure whether we are tracking it already, get in touch with us at support@altmetric.com and we can make sure it’s added!

Include a link to the original source of the publication

Altmetric relies on identifiers to match up mentions with particular publications, so it’s important that when you share your research, you link to a page that includes a scholarly identifier. Some of the identifiers we use to track content include:

• DOIs
• PubMed IDs
• ISBNs
• Handles
• arXiv IDs
• Clinical Trial IDs

Your best bet is always to include a link to the journal or other platform page where the publication was originally posted. The link you include just needs to lead to the content you’ve published with a valid identifier (like a DOI), and that identifier needs to be embedded properly in the page’s meta tags.

Example: Citing research on Wikipedia

Millions of people access Wikipedia each day for basic knowledge on all manner of subjects, so incorporating your new research into Wikipedia is a really useful way of sharing knowledge. Properly citing research on Wikipedia is important and, fortunately, pretty easy!

To add a new Wikipedia citation, click the “edit” button on any subheading. Place your cursor at the end of the sentence where you would like to add your citation and select “Cite” in the visual editor.

Using the Automatic option, you’ll be prompted to include a URL or identifier for the item you’d like to cite:

When you hit “Generate,” the full citation should populate in the proper format:

Once you hit “Insert” and save your changes, the mention will be picked up by Altmetric!

Watch the attention to your publication grow!

Sharing your research on your own platforms is one great way to start conversations within your network. Once you’ve started sharing your publication, keep track of who else is talking about your work using one of our tools for researchers.

The post How to share your work online appeared first on Altmetric.

This deceivingly simple statement from a 2000 article on extension education carries substantial implications for how we approach scholarly communication and impact evaluation. Scholarship, the authors suggest, is an iterative process, where outputs and other scholarly activities are components of a larger system, not end-points of a one-way exchange of information.

Extension education in the United States fosters a cooperative exchange of information between academia and external communities and stakeholders. The programs emerged out of Land Grant colleges, focusing on “practical” areas of study (agriculture, engineering, etc.), and to “support engaged work that cuts across the spectrum of teaching, research, and service.”

So how do we define and ascribe impact for this directly translational scholarship?

Extension and other College of Agriculture and Life Sciences programs at Virginia Tech University – work on experimental farms, partnerships with corporations to improve food safety, etc. – involve non-traditional scholarly outputs often aimed at “non-traditional” audiences, yet may not benefit from robust citation data. VT liaison and Scholarly Communication Librarian Inga Haugen has been grappling with this disconnect for years in her role supporting CALS scholars and programming.

Altmetric data offers new, expanded insights around who is sharing and discussing scholarship, and where these engagements are taking place. This information can prove especially valuable for those in translational fields – but use strategy must align with disciplinary practices and mission. When Inga approached me for help last fall after she attended my Virginia Tech Altmetric sessions, we began a collaborative research project to develop a framework for altmetrics user personas, grounded in the scholarship of engagement.

What is engaged scholarship?

Education scholar and advocate Ernest Boyer proposed the idea of engaged scholarship in the 1990s, imploring scholars to go beyond narrow academic echo chambers, and view impact as multi-dimensional. His paradigm identifies four components: the scholarship of discovery, scholarship of integration, scholarship of sharing knowledge, and application of that knowledge. Boyer’s model emphasizes that research itself is essential, but not sufficient; communication must extend beyond the academy; context and interdisciplinarity is key; and, scholars be viewed as reflexive practitioners.

Inga and I delved into the research process with this paradigm as our foundation. We first obtained approval under the protocols of VT’s Institutional Review Board and began collecting various primary data available before embarking upon our qualitative survey and interviews. We selected four initial CALS scholars at Virginia Tech, representing four unique scholarly perspectives – that of a more traditional researcher, teaching-focused scholars, extension agents, and those working in experimental agriculture research centers. The interviews offered rich information about each scholar’s outputs, motivations, frustrations, and goals, yet some resonate themes emerged:

1. Narrative-driven metrics and storytelling are crucial – how can we craft impactful impact statements? How can we make scholarship personal and relatable?
2. Outreach = key – scholarship involves engagement with numerous, diverse communities. How do we uncover and foster pathways from awareness to engagement to impact (social or behavioral change)?
3. Current incentive systems and review structures don’t align with engaged scholarship – tenure and promotion, for example, are still closely tied to citation data. Can/should we develop a defined framework for analyzing altmetrics?
4. Time limitations and resource constraints – Scholars’ division of labor often leaves them taxed, and strategic social and digital media outreach is labor intensive. How can we encourage a shift in impact evaluation to reflect broader scholarly engagement?

Next steps

After we finish analyzing collected data, we will create shareable, reusable altmetrics user persona frameworks to help inform organizations’ and scholars’ efforts to amplify research/scholarly visibility and maximize impact. We have already received lots of positive feedback about the valuable potential for these personas – and are thrilled that librarians at Texas A&M University intend to take our study and conduct parallel research at their institution.

Altmetrics provide complementary data to help uncover pathways to targeted, diverse impacts – as defined by the unique scholars and communities represented. The scholarship of engagement is a conversation about values and mission and must be approached from a critical lens. Boyer’s words from 1996 ring even truer today, in the evolving contemporary research climate: “the academy must become a more vigorous partner in the search for answers to our most pressing social, civic, economic, and moral problems, and must reaffirm its historic commitment to… the scholarship of engagement.”

Lily Troia and Inga Haugen presented on the first phase of their research at the 2018 Open Repositories conference, and on further progress this week at 5:AM, an annual conference focused on the altmetrics community.

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