Library Guides: Altmetrics: Social media

Scholarly social networking tools and profiles

ResearchGate
ResearchGate is an academic social network created to facilitate collaborative discussion between scientists. Researchers are encouraged to upload their publications, conference papers and raw data sets for discussion. ResearchGate has partnered with DataCite and can generate a DOI for any research outputs you upload, which makes them citable.

Researchers can create a profile in ResearchGate and metrics are provided including citations, ‘impact points’ based on journal impact factors, profile and publication views (both daily or weekly and by country or institution), and publication or dataset downloads. ResearchGate also provides an overall RG score based on anything you have added to your profile, and your interactions with others on the website. Although ResearchGate has no fees, accessing documents usually requires the user to have an account.
Academia.edu
Academia.edu is a free social networking platform for academics which aims to provide a system for scientists to share their results, independently of the current journal system.
Researchers can create a profile in Academia.edu and list or upload their publications and monitor analytics such as the number of views of their profile or documents, and their number of followers.
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)
ORCID stands for: Open Researcher and Contributor ID and is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create an international, interdisciplinary, central registry of unique and persistent identifiers for individual researchers, and a way to link the identifiers with researchers' outputs and activities. Registration is free

Researchers can create a profile in ORCID that lists all their research outputs. While the profile does not provide any metrics, you may be able to use a researcher’s ORCID id to search for metrics in other tools, for example see the Altmetric ORCID Profile below.

Social bookmarking or reference management tools

CiteULike
CiteULike is a free, web-based online reference management tool which allows users to share and save citations to academic papers. Users can add publications to their CiteULike library and review and rate them, as well as see what other users are bookmarking. CiteULike is based on the principle of social bookmarking to increase the sharing of academic citations.
Aggregators such as Altmetric, Impactstory and Plum Analytics collect reader counts from CiteULike.
Zotero
Zotero is a free open source reference management tool that integrates with web browsers.
As well as storing and organising your references (and files), you can also use it collaboratively by setting up a Zotero group to share your references with others.
Zotero is currently developing a public API that will return anonymous readership counts for universal identifiers (e.g. ISBN, DOI).
Pinterest
Pinterest is a free social bookmarking platform for sharing images, media and webpages on any topic.
The number of mentions of a publication or other research output on Pinterest can be used as an impact metric, and this is one of the metrics gathered by Altmetric.com.
bit.ly
bitly is a free URL shortening service for up to 10000 shortening requests a day. Once you have shortened a link, if you sign in, you can view metrics for it including how many times it has been clicked over time, where it has been shared, and the geographic distribution of clicks.
Plum Analytics is one company making use of bit.ly data in their metrics.
To get started - sign in using your email address, Facebook account or Twitter account.
A paid enterprise product is also available offering high-volume access to the API data. - http://www.enterprise.bitly.com/

Blogs

Blogging is increasing amongst academics, in particular graduate research students, and early career researchers. It provides a forum to canvas ideas and test research in its early phases. It is being encouraged as a forum for research students to test and practice their communication and writing skills in a less formal academic environment, also contributing to future abilities to communicate their research “beyond the ivory tower”. Comments on blogs indicate readership and interaction are recordable, although quality of the blog is not assessable.

ScienceSeeker
A site that collates science blogs and news sites. Users can ‘claim’ blogs and track referrals to their blogs. The site also provides a 'create citation' service that allows ‘mentions’ to be more easily tracked. Some altmetric aggregators source blog mentions of articles from this site. Alternatively 'mentions' can be searched for using an API (http://scienceseeker.org/api) – an easier search interface is in development. ScienceSeeker is free.

Using Social Media to communicate your research

Other social media tools

Twitter
Twitter can be used as a professional medium for discussing and disseminating scholarly articles, with tweets becoming impact indicators.
Note: The term altmetrics first appeared on Twitter as the #altmetrics hashtag. Anyone can sign up for a free twitter account and all content is publicly available.
Facebook
The impact of a Facebook post can be determined by the number of likes, shares or comments it receives. ‘Shared’ and ‘liked’ posts filter through the newsfeed of your established network where the post can be disseminated further.
Note: aggregator tools such as Altmetric.com, Impactstory and Plum Analytics can only gather metrics for public facebook posts, and may only consider the number of posts mentioning a research output, rather than the number of likes, shares or comments it receives. Facebook is a free service.
Reddit
The “front page of the internet,” Reddit is a message board where users submit links and ‘vote’ on those links. The number of upvotes minus downvotes on Reddit determines the score of a post and the comments made by users. Subreddits allow the user to find content that is personalised and tailored to their subject interests. Users can access content for free, but must sign up to post on the forums.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn users create a professional profile and connect with others working in the same or a related field. They can also ‘follow’ individual researchers or universities/departments. Users can identify their own skills and strengths, and other users can elect to ‘endorse’ these. Altmetric collects online mentions of scholarly papers from LinkedIn. Whilst this is a free service, several plans are offered via a payment-based premium service.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the 6th most visited site on the web, is an online editable encyclopaedia. Altmetric aggregators collect information about how often individual artefacts (such as journal articles, books or websites) have been cited on Wikipedia. Detailed metrics for Wikipedia articles are also available, which include the percentage of edits by individual contributors, usage statistics (views over set time periods), inbound/outbound links and number of watchers (people who have subscribed to be notified of any changes to the article). Metrics are freely available.