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Altmetrics

Tracking altmetrics

If you are a researcher who already utilises social media to promote your research, it is possible to collect data within these services such as views, shares and mentions in the analytics section of your Twitter account or Word Press Blog. 

It can take time to track and collect anything that would be relevant and useful which is why altmetrics tracking services have been developed. These services recognised that publishers, research institutions and most importantly researchers would benefit from being provided with an alternative view of research metrics and that they could provide the tracking and collating for them. Depending on the service they may charge a fee and/or provide free tools for researchers.  

Currently there are 3 main tracking service available:

  

 

Altmetrics tracking services

Altmetric.com offers both free and subscription based tools for publishers, institutions and researchers interested in tracking and viewing engagement with their research outputs.

The Altmetric.com donut provides an Altmetric Attention Score for a research output they have tracked, "the score is a weighted count of the different sources that mention a particular output. News articles are given greater weight than blog posts, which have greater weight than Twitter or other social media posts, reflecting the relative value of those various sources".

 

Altmetric.com Explorer for Institutions provides more detailed analysis and benchmarking for researchers. See the tab on this libguide for more detailed information for Monash researchers.

Plum Analytics Altmetrics was previously part of EBSCO, a service responsible for research library databases like CINAHL PLUS and Business Source Premier. Plum Analytics is now owned by Elsevier, who own Scopus, SciVal and Science Direct databases and Mendeley. They offer a subscription based service for research institutions for more detailed tracking and analysis of altmetrics across departments and benchmarking with other universities.

Plum have defined their altmetrics into 5 categories:

 

The Plum Print similar to the Altmetric.com donut is a visualisation of the altmetrics for a particular output or what Plum refers to as an Artifact.

 

 

 

 

About altmetrics

About Plum Artifacts

Impactstory is a service available for researchers to join for free with with a Twitter account or log-in with their ORCID iD registration details, it allows researchers to build a profile to showcase their various academic activities.

Once registered, users can add to their profile all of their scholarly outputs, such as articles, presentation slides, videos, data etc, quoting the URLs or identifiers including PubMed IDs and DOIs. Impactstory also has integration with ORCID details and Google Scholar profiles to allow automatic updates.
Impactstory then uses various external services to track metrics relevant to the engagement and use of those outputs.

Example researcher Impactstory profile page

 

About Impactstory data

About Impactstory achievements

Kudos is a free service that helps researchers promote their research outputs. Allows you to showcase your publications by:

  • creating links to full text and including additional information like short title, lay language explanation, impact statement 
  • link to additional related content such as underlying data, code, video, slides, etc. 
  • streamlined process of sharing your content via social media and allows you to monitor the results of that activity.

An institutional fee based subscription is also available for more detailed analysis and benchmarking