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Research metrics and publishing: NTROs

Introduction

Demonstrating Impact for Non-Traditional Research Outputs (NTROs)

Non-Traditional Research Outputs (NTROs) showcase research through creative, practice-based, or applied forms such as performances, exhibitions, creative writing, digital projects, or design.

Unlike traditional outputs, they are not always captured well by citation-based metrics. This guide provides practical advice on how to make NTROs visible, accessible, and assessable for impact. It outlines best practices for planning ahead, assigning DOIs, recording meaningful engagement, and using specialised tools to demonstrate the reach and influence of your work.

For discipline-specific requirements, please refer to your faculty’s NTRO guidelines.

Plan for impact

Non-Traditional Research Outputs (NTROs) often do not fit neatly into traditional measures of research impact such as citation counts. Instead, they require more tailored and proactive approaches to ensure their value is visible and assessable.

Plan for impact

Plan for impact assessment from the beginning of the project. This includes:

  • Ensuring the output has a DOI (see instructions below).
  • Consistently using this DOI across all mentions, publications, promotional material, and platforms, so engagement is traceable.
  • Identifying the most relevant tools and methods for recording impact for your specific type of output.

What to record while creating and sharing your NTRO

Because NTROs are diverse (e.g. performances, exhibitions, creative works, software, digital humanities projects), a wide range of indicators may be relevant. You don’t need all of them - select those that align with your output type.

Audience metrics

  • Visitor numbers for exhibitions, installations, or performances (gallery/museum counts, box office data)
  • Attendance at launches, artist talks, workshops, or screenings
  • Ticket sales, registrations, or subscriptions (e.g. theatre seasons, music festivals)
  • Book, catalogue, or artwork sales through publishers, bookshops, or galleries

Engagement indicators

  • Qualitative feedback: visitor books, audience surveys, testimonials, online comments
  • Media coverage: reviews in newspapers or arts magazines, interviews, radio podcasts, blogs
  • Public programming: community workshops, school programs, outreach events linked to the NTRO
  • Online usage: downloads, streams, or views (for recordings, datasets, or digital works)

Scholarly and curatorial recognition

  • Citations or references in academic articles, catalogues, or scholarly materials
  • Inclusion in curated collections, catalogues, anthologies, or disciplinary repositories
  • Selection for prestigious festivals, biennales, or curated exhibitions (local, national, or international)

Awards and prizes

  • NTRO-specific awards (e.g. art prizes, literary awards, screen industry awards
  • Festival, exhibition, or industry commendations (national or international)

Cultural and community impact

  • Demonstrated partnerships through the output: evidence that the NTRO has been produced, exhibited, performed, or disseminated in collaboration with Australian cultural institutions, Indigenous communities, local government, schools, community organisations, or industry partners
  • Evidence of policy or practice influence (e.g. adoption in curriculum, contribution to professional guidelines, impact on community programs)
  • Invitations or commissions to present, exhibit, perform, or create new work (from organisations, festivals, or companies)
  • Demonstrated uptake across different sectors or audiences (e.g. health, environment, education, local communities)
  • International reach: touring exhibitions, overseas screenings or performances, translated or adapted works

Altmetrics and online visibility

  • Mentions in policy documents, news outlets, or cultural reports
  • Social media attention (X, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn)
  • References in Wikipedia, Open Syllabus Project, or online directories
  • Platform-specific statistics (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Trove, institutional repository downloads)

Why capture this information?

Collecting and organising this data ensures that, once your NTRO is linked to a DOI, the attention it receives can be systematically tracked in tools such as Altmetric Explorer, PlumX, and Overton (see below). Together, these help you demonstrate the cultural, societal, and scholarly impact of your work.

Tip: Keep a simple log (spreadsheet, project diary, or even a shared Google Doc) to record visits, feedback, and mentions as they happen. Retrospectively collecting this information can be very difficult.

 

Create impact (via Bridges)

Monash Bridges publication

One of the best ways to publicise your research is via a digital object identifier (DOI). DOIs can be used to disseminate your research in Facebook posts, blog posts, X feeds, policy inclusions, news outlets, Wikipedia pages and other media.

When you publish your work through Bridges it becomes immediately available, without a login, to anyone who has an internet connection. A DOI is also automatically created.

Bridges allows Monash researchers to make their research (or part of it) publicly available in one of three ways: 

  1. Upload your data into Bridges, describe the research, and make the data and description publicly available. To do this in Bridges, select 'Add files or folders'.
  2. For data that is already publicly available such as on a website, create a description of the research and link to the data from the Bridges public item. To do this in Bridges, select 'Link to external files'.

  3. For data that cannot (or cannot yet) be made publicly available, create a description of the research without providing access to the data. To do this in Bridges, select 'Set as metadata record'.

How to create a public Bridges item

Follow these steps to create a public item in Bridges:

  1. Log in to Bridges using your Monash credentials at bridges.monash.edu.

  2. Click '+ Create a new item'.

  3. Choose one of the three options

    • Add files or folders - to make your data publicly available

    • Link to external files - when your data is already publicly available

    • Set as metadata record - when you don't want to provide access to you data but you do want others to know about your research.  

  4. Work your way through the form and complete the relevant fields, keeping in mind that the following seven fields are compulsory:

    • Item title

    • Group

    • Item type

    • Authors

    • Keywords

    • Description

    • Licence

  5. Click 'Publish item' and follow the prompts.

One you have published your item you can view it live at bridges.monash.edu where it will appear on the top line. To find your DOI, click on your now live item, and click on 'Cite'. The DOI can now be used to publicise your research.

Bridges ORCID integration

You can integrate your Monash Bridges account with your ORCID account to ensure that any research published in Monash Bridges is automatically visible in your ORCID profile, and vice versa. To set up the integration follow these steps:

  1. Log in to Monash Bridges, click on your profile icon on the top right and select 'Integrations'.

  2. Select 'Connect to ORCID'.

  3. You have three options:

    • Push data to my ORCID (toggle on/off)

    • Pull data from my ORCID to my account (toggle on/off)

    • Create draft records from my ORCID data (toggle on/off)

You can disconnect the integration at any time.

 

Tip: Linking your NTROs to your ORCID and ResearcherID/Scopus profile ensures they are associated with your researcher identity across systems.

Assess impact

Once you have linked your NTRO to a DOI and an appropriate descriptive record in Bridges, you have the foundation for utilising tools like Altmetric Explorer, PlumX (via Scopus) and Overton for capturing and communicating its broader impact.

These platforms draw on a broad range of sources to monitor various forms of attention, engagement, influence and reach. These measures may help demonstrate the societal, cultural, and academic impact of NTROs.

Altmetric Explorer

Sources / source types What it measures How to use the tool Export options

Your NTRO will have Altmetric attention if the source of the attention is tracked by Altmetric Explorer.

The exact list of sources can change over time. Some key source types curated by Altmetric include:

 

  • Policy Documents (e.g. WHO, Parliamentary sources)
  • News Outlets (e.g. The Guardian, Reuters)
  • Social Media (e.g. X, BlueSky)
  • Wikipedia Citations within Wikipedia articles
  • Faculty Opinions Expert recommendations (formerly F1000Prime)
  • Mendeley Readers Number of people who saved the article
  • Syllabi Mentions References in Open Syllabus Project
  • PubPeer post-publication peer review

 

Example of Altmetric metrics

Our sources
  • Research outputs - List of outputs with individual attention scores and source breakdowns

 

  • Mentions - All individual mentions, filterable by source, outlet, author, country, and time 

 

  • Demographics -Geographic spread of attention by country and source

 

  • Timeline - Attention trends over time, source-specific timelines

 

  • Advanced filtering and search (by keyword, DOI, ISBN, timeframe, subject, SDG goals, etc.)

Click "Edit Search" to open the   Advanced Search menu.

For NTROs it's best to select "Full  Altmetric database".

 

Enter a DOI prefix or select from the other available ways to refine your search to find your NTROs.

 Look for the "Export this tab" button to export results to CSV.

PlumX (Plum Analytics) via Scopus

Sources / source types What it measures How to use the tool Export options

You can access PlumX attention for your NTROs that are indexed in Scopus database.

 

Sources curated by PlumX include

 

  • Mendeley
  • SSRN
  • Facebook
  • Digital Commons
  • Wikipedia
  • Institutional Repositories, RePEc
  • CrossRef
  • SciELO
  • Overton etc.

 

 

Example of PlumX metrics

 

PlumX metrics (has the full source list in the five categories)
  •  Captures - Bookmarks, Code Forks, Favourites, Readers, Watchers. 
     
  • Mentions - Blog posts, Comments, Reviews, Wikipedia References, News Media. 
  • Social Media - Shares, Likes, Comments, Ratings. 
  • Usage - Clicks, Downloads, Views, Library Holdings, Video Plays.
     
  • Citations - Citation Indexes, Patent, Clinical & Policy Citations. 

Select the "Authors" tab to search by Author name or ORCID. This will take you to your Author Profile where you can see your Documents and Preprints in Scopus.

 

To view metrics for individual documents, click the document title, and then select the Impact tab (above the abstract). Where PlumX metrics have been captured, they will be listed here.

 When viewing individual documents, the metrics are not included in the exportable fields.

Overton

Sources / source types What it measures How to use the tool Export options

Overton traces how academic work influences real-world policy. Sources include:

  • Government departments and ministries (e.g. Australian Department of Education)
  • Parliaments and legislatures (e.g. US Congress)
  • Intergovernmental organizations (e.g. WHO, UN)
  • Think tanks and research institutes (e.g. Grattan Institute)
  • NGOs and advocacy groups that produce policy reports
  • Government agencies and regulators (e.g., the FDA, EPA, ASIC)

 

Characteristics of Overton Index's data

 

Overton: A bibliometric database of policy document citations
  • Citations: policy document explicitly refers to an academic publication
     
  • Mentions: policy document refers to a researcher, project, institution, or sometimes a paper. (Captures attention even where there was not enough detail to formally cite).

e.g. Citations in policy documents, policy influence of reports, briefs, expert contributions including to guideline development.

Search for yourself using the “Search People” tab.

 

Searches can be filtered by sector, organisation type, country/region, year etc.

 Export to CSV, Excel, PPT or RIS.

Conclusion

Capturing and demonstrating the impact of NTROs requires a combination of early planning, thoughtful documentation, and the use of specialised tools.

By ensuring your work has a DOI, recording meaningful forms of engagement, and monitoring its reach through platforms like Altmetric Explorer, PlumX, and Overton, you can make the full value of your research visible. NTROs enrich scholarship, culture, and society in diverse ways, and effective impact assessment helps ensure this contribution is recognised within and beyond academia.