Monday 1 February 2016

Starting to assess the broader impact of your published work

 Source: http://openuct.uct.ac.za/blog/starting-assess-broader-impact-your-published-work

Starting to assess the broader impact of your published work









Blog post by Sarah Goodier
27 May 2013


Academics, researchers and postgrad students everywhere know the
drill of publishing an article: do the research, write the paper, submit
it to a journal (or several, after it’s initially rejected) and after
dealing with reviewer comments and edits, you reach the proud moment
when you see your research paper published.  After this, to see how your
paper has been received by the scholarly community, you wait to see the
citations your paper accumulates over time.


However, citations can have a long lag time after publication.  So,
you may have to wait a long while to see who’s been reading your paper
and how they are using it in conducting and writing up their own
research.  And even then, the citations are only a part of the story. 
They can’t give you an idea of how many people may have come across your
article online and bookmarked it or shared it with colleagues, NGOs or
their communities.  The citations in academic publications leave you
with no sense of how other readers, beyond the limited number academic
community members who included your work in their reference lists, might
be interacting with your work.


Is my research making an impact?


Using Altmetrics


Enter, altmetrics
(alternative metrics or article level metrics, as it is also known). 
Altmetrics are an immediate and much broader way to view the impact of
your work online.  They can include mentions in blog posts, bookmarks,
tweets, views and downloads, shares on Facebook and mentions in news
articles.  All of these can give you a much better idea of how your work
is being used and the wider audiences it’s reaching.  You can also look
at the altmetrics for your research outputs beyond journal articles –
so the reach and impact of blog posts, white papers, policy briefs and
more can also be assessed using these metrics.  And looking at the
altmetrics for the different articles piling up in your “to read” folder
could also give you an idea of where to begin.  


Tools of the Trade


ImpactStory is
one altmetrics aggregating service you could try, and (lucky for us)
it’s free to use.  This particular service looks at several sources for
the altmetrics it displays: Github, PLoS , CiteULike, Scopus, Wikipedia, ScienceSeeker (for mentions in blog posts), Dryad, Mendeley, Topsy (for Twitter data), Delicious (for social bookmarks), PubMed and PMC, Figshare, Slideshare and Facebook
So, it draws on sources of traditional measures of impact (citations)
as well as the non-traditional measures (e.g. mentions of your article
in a blog post, the number of tweets and Facebook likes).  One important
thing to note is the focus on sources that would provide data on
science-related outputs but humanities researchers should still
definitely give this a try.


To see the ImpactStory of your work, you can create a “collection”
You will need one or more of the accepted identifiers of each piece of
work: the digital object identifier (DOI), the PubMed ID, the URL or the
ORCID identifier.  There is also an option to upload your list of
publications in your Google Scholar profile via a BibTex file.  You can
also provide your Slideshare or Github IDs to add those outputs to your
collection.  While you can register with ImpactStory, this is not
essential (at this stage) to create collection or view their
altmetrics.  So, once you’ve added all the necessary output information,
you can click the “Make my profile” button, sit back and discover the
online life of your work.  For each item with metrics, you can expand
the view to see detailed metrics for the articles.


While altmetrics is not a comprehensive measure of impact (not every share or interaction can be tracked: e.g. “dark social”,
the web traffic which most analytics programs and services can’t see),
these tools provide a unique window into the world of what happens to
your work after it’s published online.  You may just find your paper has
had a secret life all its own!


____________________________________


Want to know more? Here are some recent articles introductory articles on altmetrics to get you started:


http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/12/17/scott-altmetrics-central-digital-whats-missing/


http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-13/AprMay13_Mounce.html#8


http://aoasg.org.au/altmetrics-and-open-access-a-measure-of-public-interest/


http://arxiv.org/html/1203.4745v1


by SarahG
CC-BY-SA
- See more at: http://openuct.uct.ac.za/blog/starting-assess-broader-impact-your-published-work#sthash.4kVKi974.dpuf








Starting to assess the broader impact of your published work









Blog post by Sarah Goodier
27 May 2013


Academics, researchers and postgrad students everywhere know the
drill of publishing an article: do the research, write the paper, submit
it to a journal (or several, after it’s initially rejected) and after
dealing with reviewer comments and edits, you reach the proud moment
when you see your research paper published.  After this, to see how your
paper has been received by the scholarly community, you wait to see the
citations your paper accumulates over time.


However, citations can have a long lag time after publication.  So,
you may have to wait a long while to see who’s been reading your paper
and how they are using it in conducting and writing up their own
research.  And even then, the citations are only a part of the story. 
They can’t give you an idea of how many people may have come across your
article online and bookmarked it or shared it with colleagues, NGOs or
their communities.  The citations in academic publications leave you
with no sense of how other readers, beyond the limited number academic
community members who included your work in their reference lists, might
be interacting with your work.


Is my research making an impact?


Using Altmetrics


Enter, altmetrics
(alternative metrics or article level metrics, as it is also known). 
Altmetrics are an immediate and much broader way to view the impact of
your work online.  They can include mentions in blog posts, bookmarks,
tweets, views and downloads, shares on Facebook and mentions in news
articles.  All of these can give you a much better idea of how your work
is being used and the wider audiences it’s reaching.  You can also look
at the altmetrics for your research outputs beyond journal articles –
so the reach and impact of blog posts, white papers, policy briefs and
more can also be assessed using these metrics.  And looking at the
altmetrics for the different articles piling up in your “to read” folder
could also give you an idea of where to begin.  


Tools of the Trade


ImpactStory is
one altmetrics aggregating service you could try, and (lucky for us)
it’s free to use.  This particular service looks at several sources for
the altmetrics it displays: Github, PLoS , CiteULike, Scopus, Wikipedia, ScienceSeeker (for mentions in blog posts), Dryad, Mendeley, Topsy (for Twitter data), Delicious (for social bookmarks), PubMed and PMC, Figshare, Slideshare and Facebook
So, it draws on sources of traditional measures of impact (citations)
as well as the non-traditional measures (e.g. mentions of your article
in a blog post, the number of tweets and Facebook likes).  One important
thing to note is the focus on sources that would provide data on
science-related outputs but humanities researchers should still
definitely give this a try.


To see the ImpactStory of your work, you can create a “collection”
You will need one or more of the accepted identifiers of each piece of
work: the digital object identifier (DOI), the PubMed ID, the URL or the
ORCID identifier.  There is also an option to upload your list of
publications in your Google Scholar profile via a BibTex file.  You can
also provide your Slideshare or Github IDs to add those outputs to your
collection.  While you can register with ImpactStory, this is not
essential (at this stage) to create collection or view their
altmetrics.  So, once you’ve added all the necessary output information,
you can click the “Make my profile” button, sit back and discover the
online life of your work.  For each item with metrics, you can expand
the view to see detailed metrics for the articles.


While altmetrics is not a comprehensive measure of impact (not every share or interaction can be tracked: e.g. “dark social”,
the web traffic which most analytics programs and services can’t see),
these tools provide a unique window into the world of what happens to
your work after it’s published online.  You may just find your paper has
had a secret life all its own!


____________________________________


Want to know more? Here are some recent articles introductory articles on altmetrics to get you started:


http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/12/17/scott-altmetrics-central-digital-whats-missing/


http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-13/AprMay13_Mounce.html#8


http://aoasg.org.au/altmetrics-and-open-access-a-measure-of-public-interest/


http://arxiv.org/html/1203.4745v1


by SarahG
CC-BY-SA














Starting to assess the broader impact of your published work

- See more at: http://openuct.uct.ac.za/blog/starting-assess-broader-impact-your-published-work#sthash.4kVKi974.dpuf
- See more at: http://openuct.uct.ac.za/blog/starting-assess-broader-impact-your-published-work#sthash.4kVKi974.dpuf






Starting to assess the broader impact of your
published work
Blog post by Sarah Goodier

27 May 2013
Academics, researchers and postgrad
students everywhere know the drill of publishing an article: do the research,
write the paper, submit it to a journal (or several, after it’s initially
rejected) and after dealing with reviewer comments and edits, you reach the
proud moment when you see your research paper published.  After this, to
see how your paper has been received by the scholarly community, you wait to
see the citations your paper accumulates over time.
However, citations can have a long
lag time after publication.  So, you may have to wait a long while to see
who’s been reading your paper and how they are using it in conducting and writing
up their own research.  And even then, the citations are only a part of
the story.  They can’t give you an idea of how many people may have come
across your article online and bookmarked it or shared it with colleagues, NGOs
or their communities.  The citations in academic publications leave you
with no sense of how other readers, beyond the limited number academic
community members who included your work in their reference lists, might be
interacting with your work.
Using Altmetrics
Enter, altmetrics (alternative metrics or article level metrics, as
it is also known).  Altmetrics are an immediate and much broader way to
view the impact of your work online.  They can include mentions in blog
posts, bookmarks, tweets, views and downloads, shares on Facebook and mentions
in news articles.  All of these can give you a much better idea of how
your work is being used and the wider audiences it’s reaching.  You can
also look at the altmetrics for your research outputs beyond journal articles –
so the reach and impact of blog posts, white papers, policy briefs and more can
also be assessed using these metrics.  And looking at the altmetrics for
the different articles piling up in your “to read” folder could also give you
an idea of where to begin.   
Tools of the Trade
ImpactStory is one
altmetrics aggregating service you could try, and (lucky for us) it’s free to
use.  This particular service looks at several sources for the altmetrics
it displays: Github, PLoS , CiteULike,
Scopus, Wikipedia, ScienceSeeker
(for mentions in blog posts), Dryad, Mendeley,
Topsy
(for Twitter data), Delicious (for social bookmarks), PubMed and PMC, Figshare, Slideshare and Facebook
So, it draws on sources of traditional measures of impact (citations) as well
as the non-traditional measures (e.g. mentions of your article in a blog post,
the number of tweets and Facebook likes).  One important thing to note is
the focus on sources that would provide data on science-related outputs but
humanities researchers should still definitely give this a try.
To see the ImpactStory of your work,
you can create a “collection”.  You will need one or
more of the accepted identifiers of each piece of work: the digital object
identifier (DOI), the PubMed ID, the URL or the ORCID identifier.  There
is also an option to upload your list of publications in your Google Scholar
profile via a BibTex file.  You can also provide your Slideshare or Github
IDs to add those outputs to your collection.  While you can register with
ImpactStory, this is not essential (at this stage) to create collection or view
their altmetrics.  So, once you’ve added all the necessary output
information, you can click the “Make my profile” button, sit back and discover
the online life of your work.  For each item with metrics, you can expand
the view to see detailed metrics for the articles.
While altmetrics is not a
comprehensive measure of impact (not every share or interaction can be tracked:
e.g. “dark social”, the web
traffic which most analytics programs and services can’t see), these tools
provide a unique window into the world of what happens to your work after it’s
published online.  You may just find your paper has had a secret life all
its own!
____________________________________
Want to know more? Here are some
recent articles introductory articles on altmetrics to get you started:
by SarahG
CC-BY-SA
- See more at:
http://openuct.uct.ac.za/blog/starting-assess-broader-impact-your-published-work#sthash.4kVKi974.dpuf



Starting to assess the broader impact of your published work

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