Research metrics and journal evaluation have been increasingly discussed amongst researchers, funders and those in academic institutions, over recent years. At the same time, publishers have been quick to add this data to their platforms, for example embedding the Altmetric donut badge.
So what does the evolution of these new metrics mean for academic journal editors, and how can they ensure that their publication benefits from their application? Read this guest post from Altmetric for some ideas for how journal editors can put that data to use.
Altmetric tracks where individual research outputs are discussed online in a variety of non-traditional sources, including in public policy documents, mainstream and social media, academic forums, and other sites such as Wikipedia and The Conversation. All of these ‘mentions’ are gathered together and compiled into what we call the ‘details page’; the collated record of attention for an individual output.
On journals with the Altmetric donut badges embedded in their article pages (this is available on all journals on Taylor & Francis Online, for articles published since 2012), readers and authors can click on the donut to be taken to the details page for that output – where they can explore all of the original mentions of that research, and click through to the original sources where the mentions were made.
With hundreds of unique policy, media and blog sources, Altmetric scans a huge list of sites in real time looking for links to domains that are on our whitelist (such as a journal publisher domain).
We follow these links to determine which piece of research the mention refers to, and match that up based on the identifier we find on the resulting page (the identifier might be a DOI, a PubMed ID, SSRN ID, or even just the unique URL of the page).
This tracking happens in real time, meaning as soon as an article is published we begin to pick up any mentions, and new mentions appear on the details page shortly after they’ve been made.
Altmetrics offer lots of opportunities for journal editors and their teams. Here are some of the key ways we’d suggest you might get started with the altmetrics data for your publication:
And lastly, don’t forget to…
This is a guest post by Cat Chimes, Head of Marketing at Altmetric, first published on the Altmetric blog.