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Elevating your Online Profile as a Researcher

This guide is designed to highlight the various tools and services which you can use to be more visible as a researcher in the online environment.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analysing and informing scholarship. As scholars increasingly move more of their academic activity to the web, altmetrics offer complementary ways to measure research impact beyond the traditional methods such as peer review and citation counts. 

Altmetrics is summarized in: J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Altmetrics: A manifesto, 26 October 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto

Three example profile services, which make use of altmetrics are Impact Story, Altmetric, and Plum Analytics. Each service records and aggregates some or all of the following types of activity:

  • Scholarly usage data: Web-page views, PDF downloads
  • Scholarly reference: Bookmarking, shares and recommendations from CiteULike, Zotero, Mendeley
  • Mass media mentions: NY Times, BBC, The Washington Post
  • Social media mentions: Twitter, FaceBook, Delicious
  • Data and code usage: Dryad, GitHub
  • Component mentions: SlideShare, Figshare

Groth P, Taylor M. (2013) Helping scholars tell their stories using altmetrics.