Using Altmetric’s data, pharmaceutical brands can see how these communities are using their research, what they’re saying about it and how that compares to competitor offerings. It’s at once a means to measure and maximize influence and a way to manage your reputation.

Practical benefits

By incorporating altmetrics with traditional analysis methods, medical affairs teams can improve their publication planning efforts with ease, ensuring that key scientific statements reach a diverse audience. Immediate insights into the degree and type of engagement in both the scientific community and wider public sphere facilitate better refinement of upcoming strategies.

Data-led insights

Previous applications of altmetrics have helped shed light on how organizations can enhance their publication planning strategies to maximize reach, increase influence in their therapeutic area and attract greater public attention. 

Leading authors do not always have a strong influence online. Those researchers who publish highly-cited papers often have little authority with broader, non-academic audiences who use social media and other online platforms to learn about a disease state or therapeutic area. With altmetrics, it’s possible to find out exactly who’s saying what – and where – making it easy to find DOLS who are talking about your specific area of influence and including them in your communications strategy.

Strategic plans built on engagement

Effective publication planning requires an understanding of not only who has seen your work, but also those who are actively engaged with it. Citation analysis provides a limited perspective which ignores the subtleties found in wider digital discourse. 

To gain a more accurate measure of influence, publication planners and medical affairs teams should explore both qualitative and quantitative data. Altmetrics can show which companies and what drugs are dominating online discussion – this also has important implications when it comes to Share of Voice (SOV) and attention from physicians.

Ensuring maximum return on investment

Altmetrics data has uncovered that, surprisingly, industry-sponsored research doesn’t necessarily correlate with the overall volume of attention that it receives online. Moreover, that the sponsorship status of research doesn’t negatively affect the degree of attention that research receives. This is reassuring for medical publication professionals, as it may demonstrate an increase in public trust in industry-sponsored research. This demonstrates the benefits of following good publication practices when communicating sponsored medical research. By promoting transparency and staying accountable, pharmaceutical organizations can protect their integrity and improve public perception of their brand, using altmetrics to stay on track. 

To sum up, there’s hard proof that altmetrics can help pharmaceutical brands to find unique DOLs, illuminate the growth of therapeutic areas, measure influence and test assumptions about industry-sponsored research. An essential counterpart to citation counts and other quantitative measures, altmetrics are an invaluable source of insights for organizations to measure value and maximize reach.

Read our report ‘Building a bigger picture to’ to learn more about how you can measure value and maximise reach.

The post Measure value and maximize reach with altmetrics appeared first on Altmetric.

One of the assumptions that underpinned the need for such evaluations was that there was a disconnect. A disconnect between academics in their proverbial ivory towers and the ‘real world’ who might benefit from scientific endeavour. Talk of a ‘gap’ or ‘chasm’ between the two sides was common; attempts at bridging the apparent divide were legion, and doomed to failure. 

At the very least, many people would assume there was little or any alignment given the preconceptions of ivory towers and wasted tax dollars on irrelevant research.

What has enabled this vexed question to now be answered is both the availability of huge databases on information and the capacity to cross-reference them. In total, five large datasets were used by the authors, two of them provided by Microsoft and two by Digital Science in the shape of Altmetric and Dimensions. The former provides the fulcrum as Altmetric tracks a range of online sources referencing scholarly content, collating this information in a way that enables reporting around online attention. The idea of the article is that if we can see what research has been invested in by funders and then map it to the research society has engaged with, we will see if there is any alignment between public funding and public use.

And the answer is an emphatic ‘yes’. 

At the end of their results, the authors state:

“Although each research field differs substantially in its relative role and contribution in science and beyond, the combination of their impacts beyond science powerfully predicts funding, suggesting that, ultimately, what the public uses, what scientists use and what is funded are remarkably consistent.” – Yin et al, 2022

After looking across all the main subject areas in science, social science and humanities, factors differed in terms of the public they exhibited with government, news and people in general. However, high-impact science tends to be consumed more by the public, and scientific funding for a field of research or discipline appears to be closely aligned with the totality of its public utility.

The implications of this research are clear: for researchers, administrators, government organizations and funders, the data shows that public use of research dovetails where funding has been placed, which in turn proves to funding providers there has been return on their original investment. For those in the academic or funding fields, the study really highlights where Altmetric comes into its own, by identifying online attention metrics that demonstrate real public engagement. 

The article is the realization of the Holy Grail for its authors and many others in showing how public funding and public use of research are aligned. The Holy Grail for funders and academic institutions has always been something similar, and with Altmetric this study shows that those aspirations are now possible. 

The name Altmetric is, of course, a portmanteau word that combines the separate terms ‘alternative’ and ‘metrics’. The brand name – and wider field of study of altmetrics – were in part conceived as a new way to understand the influence research has outside the narrow confines of citation counting, which had dominated the conversation around measuring research outcomes for decades. With altmetrics, technology now gives visibility to what research is gaining traction in the wider world. 

To find out how Altmetric can support your research get in touch today.

Reference

​​Yin, Y., Dong, Y., Wang, K. et al. Public use and public funding of science. Nat Hum Behav (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01397-5 

The post Breaking Down Barriers – Rethinking assumptions on research and impact appeared first on Altmetric.

To mark the occasion and to contribute to the discussion we had a look into the publication age of researchers that are publishing in the ‘Climate Action’ space with papers relating to SDG 13. 

Publication age refers to the years between an author’s first publication and their most recent publication. For example, if someone published their first paper in 2002, and their most recent one in 2018, their publication age would be 17 years (=2018-2002+1).

Once we had a breakdown of publication age, we split this by gender (based on the author’s first name only), so you can see from the graph below that researchers with a higher publication age are predominantly male, but the data towards the bottom of the graph could show an encouraging trend.

For those researchers with a higher publication age, the trend points in the direction of the demographic being predominantly male, however when we look at researchers with ‘younger’ publication ages, we see the breakdown beginning to balance somewhat – suggesting that female researchers are becoming more prominent in this field and the demographic is starting to become more equal.

We also looked at papers associated with a few more SDGs, to see if there was an overarching trend when looking at publication ages and gender. 

SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

We were pleased to see that the trend for researchers and their publication ages for SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth was also encouraging, showing similarities to the demographic shown for climate action papers. 

As the publication ages become ‘younger’, the breakdown between male and female researchers becomes more balanced. Suggesting that as Agenda 2030 becomes the focus for many researchers all over the world, male and female – we could expect to see a more balanced demographic of paper authors in terms of gender.

SDG 5: Gender Equality 

As this investigation was primarily to mark International Women’s Day, we also had a look at the papers and authors associated with SDG 5: Gender Equality. 

In this field, closely related to Gender Studies, we expect to find more women than men researchers, which is true in most publication ages; the trend is reversed for researchers with 30 years or more of publication history. 

This could reflect the fact that 30 years ago, the position of researchers was still predominantly a man’s position. Now that academic research is perhaps more accessible to women, the balance has reversed and more women are doing research on gender equality. 

Overall, our small investigation into some of the data associated with SDG related papers highlighted some promising trends. 

Across the analysis we did, the demographics were becoming more equal between male and female authorship as we moved to the ‘younger’ publication ages. Interestingly though, the field in which we saw a continued unbalanced demographic was Gender Equality….

As with all data investigation, some nuance is required. It’s important to mention that although when we look at the data above we see the proportion of female researchers growing in the younger publication age fields and this could indicate a positive trend, it could also confirm a well known fact. Statistically speaking, many women leave academia and their research careers earlier due to having children and therefore their publication ages are often significantly ‘younger’, as they don’t publish in their respective fields for the time spans that we regularly see from their male counterparts.

We hope that everyone had a wonderful International Women’s Day and enjoyed participating in all the wonderful discussions that happened across the globe! 

This thoughtful analysis was undertaken by Hélène Draux, Data Scientist in the Digital Science Consultancy Team. 

The post International Women’s Day 2022: Gender Equality today for a sustainable tomorrow appeared first on Altmetric.

During the episode, Mike and Alexander discuss Altmetric and Dimensions and the importance of understanding the reach and influence of clinical and scientific research beyond citations and understanding the full journey, from idea to impact. 

Alexander and Mike touch on a number of interesting topics during the interview, including how Altmetric and Dimensions work together in uncovering this journey, but also the insights that can be gleaned from the kind of data the tools provide. 

‘I get to sit in the middle of this wonderful web with both Dimensions data and Altmetric and I pull the two things together. And together, I can create these translational maps of where research is going from the laboratory through to the hospital and into the broader population.’ – Mike Taylor

The discussion also touches on Key Opinion Leaders and how using Altmetric and Dimensions data, links can be identified and groups of the influential leaders in different research spheres can be discovered. 

When diving into the research landscape of a particular Therapeutic Area or clinical research focus, getting the low down on who is authoring with whom, and who is ‘leading the pack’, is crucial. 

Mike and Alexander also discuss how having this kind of insight into the dissemination and ‘journey’ of research provides ‘organizational wisdom’ that can enhance foresight, competitor analysis or benchmarking and importantly, inform outreach and publication strategies.

Don’t miss this exciting discussion all about the actionable insights that Altmetric and Dimensions data can provide… 

‘The end of the story is not the publication. The end of the story is how it’s picked up.’ – Alexander Schact

Find out more: 

• Find out more about Altmetric
• Find out more about Dimensions
• Find out more about ‘The Effective Statistician’

The post ‘The Effective Statistician’ – Measuring the impact of our research via data science on data appeared first on Altmetric.

The Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences have a very different profile from that of the STEM fields. The languages and media are more diverse, their outputs have impact over a longer period of time, citations are slower to appear, and researchers in these fields often prefer to publish research in book form. 

What effects the propagation of research within society? 

As part of my research programme with Professor Michael Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton, I’ve been looking at how research findings are propagated through society, what variables are important to the distribution and diffusion of research findings, and how we can use Altmetric to understand them. 

A key variable to help us understand how propagation happens is OA status, and last month, I published a paper in Scientometrics journal that shows that OA books and chapters get significantly higher levels of attention than their non-OA equivalents, across a broad range of internet attention (including news, blogs, Twitter and policy documents). 

This information may prove to be important for two reasons: 

1. It can act as a motivation to justify investing in OA books – as it will increase social use, and we can measure this effect. 
2. We can think about how we can apply research into altmetrics as a way of measuring the effectiveness of our engagement strategies. 

How can we practically make use of Altmetric to understand and demonstrate the successes of OA books, chapters and journals? 

First, we need to recognize the insights that the research by Kim Holmberg and myself has shown. Secondly, you may be looking to compare publisher against publisher – from the perspective of a funder, a publisher or a research institution. Fortunately, Altmetric Explorer’s search and filtering tools make this kind of analysis a snap. My favourite approach is to download the data and use Excel, but of course, Altmetric Explorer will allow you to download data into many business analytical tools. 

Although there is a definite OA advantage for many disciplines and attention sources, it’s not universal. So when you’re reflecting on (for example) the proportion of your articles that get News coverage or the average of Twitter mentions, you need to take into account the field and age, as well as the type of document you’re comparing. Look at what the global population does, and compare it to yours.  

Although the underlying mechanism into the OA Altmetric Advantage is poorly understood (I discuss a few theories at the end of my paper), it does represent a clear advantage and justification for OA publishing. All of us who are involved in the Open Science movement can use this data to express this advantage, and to compare the performance of different journals, publishers and OA policies. As the research shows: this is a complex phenomena, but one that can be successfully shown using Altmetric data. 

The final version can be read here https://rdcu.be/b8mck and cited using its DOI 10.1007/s11192-020-03735-8 

This blog post was adapted from one published at the University of Wolverhampton’s website. 

Holmberg, K et al; (2019) Do articles in open access journals have more frequent altmetric activity than articles in subscription‑based journals? An investigation of the research output of Finnish universities? Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03301-x 

Taylor, M; (2020) An Altmetric Attention Advantage for Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03735-8  

The post Using Altmetric to demonstrate the success of Open Access (OA) Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences appeared first on Altmetric.

The new “contributions to science” section of the NIH Biosketch provides space for up to 5 contributions which should each include:

• the historical background that frames the scientific problem
• the influence of the finding(s) on the progress of science or the application to health or technology
• your specific role in the described work
• list of up to four peer-reviewed publications or other non-publication research outputs for each contribution

Consider all your research outputs

Before you begin, take time to jog your memory of all the research outputs from your work. These may include:

• Journal articles, books or book chapters
• Conference papers or posters
• Databases, datasets or research materials
• Software, netware, or code
• Models or protocols
• Scientific instrumentation or devices
• Audio or video products
• Educational materials for trainees, students or patients, etc.

For a more comprehensive list of outputs, download and review the Becker Model for Assessment of Research Impact.

Consider the impact of your research

Below are some ideas for highlighting the impact of your research. Any examples provided are adapted from drafts of NIH biosketches and one from a grant progress report, though all numbers and other potential identifiers have been changed.

Highlight your full range of outputs

“This project produced 11 non peer-reviewed articles, 2 reports for policy makers, 4 magazine articles, 3 local newspaper articles, 23 presentations to a variety of policy and academic audiences, and 2 book chapters.”

“This project resulted in 10 peer-reviewed articles, 2 national presentations, and 4 international presentations.”

Highlight the impact of one or more outputs

“The paper describing this work is listed below and has been cited >300 times (Scopus).”

“Collectively the 4 papers listed below have been cited more than 1,200 times by Scopus (1,100 by WoS).”

Highlight successful dissemination

The 21 publications resulting from this work have been cited by 750 subsequent works by investigators in 47 countries, and in 7 languages around the world (Scopus).

Highlight consumption by stakeholders

“There was considerable media coverage of this project, with 10 articles in national newspapers and 6 other media appearances.”

“The 4 papers describing this work were referred to by news media outlets 24 times; tweeted 13 times worldwide, including tweets from the National Cancer Institute, and commented on 8 times in PubMed Commons.”

To include or not to include

In the end, you may decide that your contributions to science speak louder than what any numbers or metrics can capture. These suggestions are meant to provide ideas and options as you consider how to communicate your science to NIH reviewers.

How do I find these numbers?

Curious about finding some of the numbers or metrics listed in the examples? Contact your library for guidance on how to track the dissemination of your research. You might also consider downloading the Altmetric bookmarklet and exploring some of the data for yourself.

Also visit the NIH Biosketch FAQ for information on compliance, citations, the contribution to science section and more.

Webinar

Altmetrics in the NIH Biosketch: demonstrate the reach and influence of your research

Gathering reliable data on the broader engagement and reach of your research can be a challenging and time-consuming process. Altmetric provides data and tools that enable you to monitor, in real-time, where research is being talked about online as soon as it’s published. Join Altmetric’s Patty Smith, a former CTSA hub librarian, for a practical overview of how altmetrics data can be included in your Biosketch.

Click here to view the on-demand webinar

The post Consider ways to write about your impact in the New NIH Biosketch appeared first on Altmetric.

Psychology, animal welfare, agricultural sustainability, defence analysis, palaeontology, higher education research, neuroscience, toxicology, ecology, nutrition. It’s a diverse list but what brings all these different areas of research together? Every one (plus more) is covered in a list of the 20 original research articles with the highest Altmetric scores, published across Taylor & Francis Group journals.

The sheer diversity of this list highlights the enormous variety of research published, but also shows that any article has the potential to gain attention online; be this via a blog, social media, or picked up by news outlets. We’re an engaged lot and if something fires the imagination (and encourages debate) it’s exciting to see just how quickly the snowball effect can begin. But what makes one journal article get picked up in this way? It’s a magic formula that isn’t always clear – is it subject matter, an effective title, a ‘hot’ topic, renowned authors, or a combination of any, all or none of these?

With Altmetric data recently added to Taylor & Francis Online and CogentOA, we had the opportunity to look at which articles, dating back to January 2012, had the highest Altmetric scores (articles published from this date now feature the Altmetric donut within the journal’s table of contents, on individual article pages and, on Taylor & Francis Online, for all authors within their My Authored Works account). We gathered these together into a ‘top 20’ list. Looking at the final list raised the question ‘why this article over another?’

To try and answer this, I asked the authors featured in the list why they thought their article had gained so much attention. Their responses were varied, and I’ve included just a few snippets here:

“…people are anxious to find out how technology is impacting relationships because its use is so ubiquitous; we are just beginning to uncover the real-life impact of our increased use of technology for communication in our intimate relationships…”

Lori Schade, licensed marriage and family therapist and adjunct faculty at Brigham Young University, Utah and co-author of ‘Using Technology to Connect in Romantic Relationships: Effects on Attachment, Relationship Satisfaction, and Stability in Emerging Adults’ (no.18 in our list)

 “…it shows how we can apply our scientific knowledge…to policy forums.  This is a type of translational science, applying our scientific knowledge to improving animal welfare and management practices.” 

Diana Reiss, Professor, Department of Psychology, City University of New York and co-author of ‘A Veterinary and Behavioral Analysis of Dolphin Killing Methods Currently Used in the “Drive Hunt” in Taiji, Japan’ (no.1 on our list)

“…most people are unaware that this organochlorine compound causes numerous adverse biological effects.  The large number of downloads has raised awareness among scientists and the general public about safety and health concerns…”

Susan S. Schiffman, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, North Carolina State University and co-author of ‘Sucralose, A Synthetic Organochlorine Sweetener: Overview Of Biological Issues’ (no.16 in our list)

Reading through their responses, what came across strongly was the importance of ‘real world’ implications for their research. Whether it was on GM crops or cyber attacks, childhood amnesia or the impact of technology on relationships, each of the articles explored a topic relevant to our everyday lives. This list highlights, as I’m going to steal from the excellent Ontario project, that ‘research matters’, not just in the lab or the lecture theatre, at a conference, or when drafting and re-drafting a paper, but in the real world and to real people.

Congratulations, and thank you, to all the authors who featured in the ‘top 20’ and then very kindly sent me their thoughts. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s on the list when we run it again next year, but the one thing I do know is that it will be just as diverse again, with just as many ‘real world’ implications and applications. Now that’s what I call impact.

The post Research and its real world implications: the Taylor & Francis Altmetric top 20 appeared first on Altmetric.

Do open access articles get higher altmetric counts?

In celebration of Open Access week we decided we’d take a look at some hybrid journals to see if there was any discernible difference in the quantitative altmetrics between their open access and reader pays articles. We picked Nature Communications to look at first as it’s a relatively high volume, multi-disciplinary-within-STM hybrid journal (at least it was during our study period – it has gone fully OA now), selects articles for publication blind to OA / non-OA status and clearly marks up authors, license and subject areas in its metadata. Plus we sit in the same building.

Coincidentally Nature Publishing Group recently commissioned a study from RIN that indicates that the OA articles in Communications get downloaded more often than their reader pays counterparts. So does that hold true when looking at other altmetrics sources?

Prepping the data & first impressions

Using a combination of the Altmetric API and web scraping we pulled together data on all the Communications papers published between 1st October 2013 and 21st October 2014. You can find all of it on figshare.

The short answer is that yes, there does seem to be a significant difference in the attention received. We’re going to cover some of the highlights below, but feel free to take the dataset and delve deeper – there’s only so much we can cover in a blog post.

First let’s characterize the dataset. It contains 2,012 articles of which 1,395 (70%) are reader pays. The bulk of articles – 1,181 (59%) – are tagged ‘Biological sciences’ by the journal. 519 (26%) are ‘Physical sciences’, 193 (10%) ‘Chemical sciences’ and 104 (5%) ‘Earth sciences’. Only 4 of the 2,012 are reviews.

We grouped articles by month of publication so that we can control for the fact that some kinds of altmetric data accrues over time. You can see this clearly in the graph below – the median number of Mendeley readers for articles published in each month is the line in red.

A tangent: every source is different

“Older articles have more” doesn’t hold true for all sources. I’ve plotted the median number of unique Twitter accounts talking about each paper by month of publication above too, in blue. Notice that the median actually trends down very slightly as we look at older papers.

This is because: (1) most tweeting happens very quickly after publication and (2) the Twitter userbase is growing incredibly rapidly so there are more people tweeting papers each month.

Think about it this way: if you compared a paper published in 2009 to a paper published in 2014, the 2009 paper would have lots of citations (accrued over time) and hardly any tweets (as not many researchers were tweeting when it was first published – Twitter was still very new). The 2014 paper would have hardly any citations but lots of tweets (as there is now a large number of tweeting researchers).

This is sometimes addressed in novel ways in altmetrics research: Mike Thelwall’s paper in PLoS One presents one elegant solution to a similar issue.

An initial hypothesis

Let’s get back to OA vs reader pays. Here in the office our initial hypothesis was that there would be an OA advantage for tweets in general as a larger audience would be more inclined to read and tweet the paper, but that the effect would be much less pronounced in Mendeley readership and amongst people who regularly tweet scientific papers.

Here’s the median number of tweeters over time, comparing the two cohorts in each month of publication:

And the median number of Mendeley readers (remember that newer articles won’t have many Mendeley readers yet):

To get a feel for the data we graphed means and 3rd quartiles too. Here’s the mean number of tweeters who regularly tweet scientific papers:

There’s a lot of light blue in these graphs and just eyeballing the data does seem to indicate an advantage for OA papers. But is it significant? Once we establish that we can start considering confounding factors.

If we look at all of the articles published in Q4 ’13 (to give ourselves a decent sized sample) we can compare the two cohorts in detail and do some sanity checking with an independent t-test. We’ll look at average author and references counts too in case they’re wildly different, which might indicate an avenue for future investigation.

Here are the results:

It seems like there is a difference between the number of tweets, the number of tweets by ‘frequent article tweeters’ and Mendeley readers.

The idea that the effect may be less pronounced for Mendeley doesn’t really hold water – a median of 23 readers for OA articles vs 13 for the reader pays is a pretty big difference.

Interestingly we didn’t see much difference in the number of news outlets or blogs covering papers in the two cohorts. A lot of news coverage is driven by press releases, and on the Nature side there is no preference for OA over reader pays when picking papers to press release (we checked).

Confounders

If we accept that the articles published as open access did get more Twitter and Mendeley attention the next obvious question is why?

Two things to check spring immediately to mind:

1. Do authors select open access for their ‘best’ papers, or papers they think will be of broader appeal?
2. People tweet about life sciences papers more than they do physical sciences ones. Perhaps the OA cohort has a higher number of biomedical papers in it? Notice that the OA cohort also has more authors, on average, than reader pays cohort. Might that be an indicator of something?

Do authors select only their ‘best’ papers for open access?

It doesn’t seem like we can discount this possibility. Macmillan’s author insight survey (warning: PDF link) have 48% of scientists saying “I believe that research should be OA” as a reason to publish open access, which leaves 52% who presumably have some other reason for wanting to do so. 32% have “I am not willing to pay an APC” as a reason not to go OA. The APC for Nature Communications is $5,200.

Are the higher altmetrics counts a reflection of subject area biases?

There doesn’t seem to be that much difference when we look at top level subjects, though it might be worth pulling out the Earth Sciences articles for a closer look.

That said, some disciplines definitely see more activity than others: if we look only at articles with the keyword ‘Genetics’ across our entire dataset, taking the median of unique tweeters per article each month then the ‘median of medians’ for OA is 21 and 6 for reader pays.

Compare that to ‘Chemical Sciences’ where the OA median of medians is only 3, and for reader pays it’s 2.

Wrapping up

Open access articles, at least those in Nature Communications, do seem to generate significantly more tweets – including tweets from people who tweet research semi-regularly – and attract more Mendeley readers than articles that are reader pays.

It seems likely that the reasons behind this aren’t as simple as just a broader audience. We’ve also only been looking at STM content.

Would we find the same thing in other journals? We deliberately looked within a single journal to account for things like differences in how sharing buttons are presented and to control for different acceptance criteria, and the downside to this is we can’t generalise, only contribute some extra datapoints to the discussion.

We’ll leave further analysis on those fronts as an exercise to the reader. Again, all the data is up on figshare. Let us know what you find out and we’ll follow up with another blog post!

You can get the dataset from and the PDF of this post here: Adie, Euan (2014): Attention! A study of open access vs non-open access articles. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1213690

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