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Research impact for Education: a self-help guide

A role for Alternative metrics?

When it comes to broad awareness of the relevance or contribution of a research outputs for different audiences, it may be helpful to look to different sources, collecting data at different stages and covering different types of views and evidence.

Commercial producers of citation indexes such as Scopus have responded and integrated alternative metrics tools and data applications into the mainstream citation tools.

 

Altmetrics telling a story

  • Here are some handy use cases of altmetrics, alternative metrics and traditional metrics to help you get funded. 

Keeping up-to-date on Altmetrics

Altmetric Explorer for institutions allows researchers to setup saved searches that track their research outputs currently being tracked by Altmetric Explorer.

If you have an Altmetric account, you can setup daily/weekly/monthly emails based on your saved database searches and even create shareable reports. You can then track the social attention to your research (through a ranked list) with minimum effort. Altmetric tracks mentions from:

  • News outlets
  • Blog mentions
  • Twitter mentions
  • Policy mentions
  • Peer review mentions
  • Wikipedia mentions

Citations through integration with Dimensions and saves through online reference networks such as Mendeley and CiteULike.

  • We recommend creating an Altmetric Explorer account so that you can access additional functionality, such as the ability to save searches, set up Shareable Reports, set up email reports, and more.
  • If you are on campus, and using a computer with a University of Melbourne IP address, you can create an account via the Sign inlink within the database.
  • If you are off campus, and already have an Altmetric Explorer account, you can access the database via the link above and Sign in with your account details. If you need to create an Altmetric Explorer account please use the unique invite link available here(University of Melbourne login required).

Step 1: Search Altmetric for Institutions

  1. Click 'Explore the Altmetric database'
  2. Exploring data from all research outputs from University of Melbourne 'Edit search'
  3. Optional: Toggle - 'Full altmetric database' OR 'My institution only'
  4. Verified Author field: start inputting first name, last name and wait for an auto-popup to generate a list of possible names to select from
  5. Once selected, choose 'run search'

Altmetric for Institutions search by first name, last name of researcher

Step 2: Produce list of tracked outputs and outputs with attention

  1. Search can be saved from this page (that will provide access to keeping up-to-date features)
  2. Optionally look in further detail at
    1. Research outputs
    2. Timeline
    3. Demographics
    4. Mentions
    5. Journals

Altmetric for Institutions summary screen of tracked search results

Step 3: Access tracked research outputs

  1. Sort by
    1. Altmetric attention score
    2. Publication date
    3. Sources
    4. Number of mentions
  2. Export data
    1. CSV format
      • Includes individual links to details pages
      • Badge URL to promote publications individually on professional blog or web page

Altmetric for Institutions tracked research outputs data

Step 4: Set up email report to track attention to the tracked outputs for the researcher

  1. Go to 'Saved Searches'
  2. Select in which way you would like to keep informed about your publication altmetrics
  3. Reports will be sent to the email address used to generate the Altmetrics account

 

Altmetric for institutions saved searches and reporting features

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