Applied Altmetrics: Implementations and Uses within an Institution

Notes: View the community notes Google doc for this session.

Session Type: Working Session (lunch)

Session Description As monitoring and reporting on the wider societal impact of research rises higher in the agenda for many institutions, we take a look at the burgeoning altmetrics movement, and examine how it can be useful in gathering this evidence.

Unlike traditional measures of impact such as citation and download counts, which typically take a long time to accrue, altmetrics offer much more immediate insight into how the research is received and used.

By tracking online mentions and links to an article we are able to determine whether it is reported in the mainstream news, blogged about by an enthusiast, shared across social media, or goes on to be incorporated into future policy and patent proposals. We disambiguate between different versions of the same article to present collated, fully auditable data for each publication. Such information can be incredibly valuable for an institution in measuring the broader impact of its research.

In this session we will explore some of the ways in which institutions can integrate altmetrics into their existing platforms, and in doing so provide greater support and feedback for their researchers.

Session Leader Sara Rouhi, Altmetric