Ben McLeish of Altmetric explains how this data science company tracks and analyses online activity around scholarly research outputs, and how medcomms professionals can use Almetric’s tools to their advantage.

Recorded 3 May 2017 at a MedComms Networking event in Oxford. Produced by NetworkPharma.tv

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ABSTRACT:

Altmetric is a London-based digital science company that tracks and analyses online activity around scholarly research outputs – capturing citations that traditional bibliometrics and journal impact factors miss. Founded in 2011, Altmetric started with a prize-winning app that was designed to measure the attention scientific articles receive on social media sites, in online reference managers and from mainstream news sources. Colourful Altmetric badges soon started to appear on publisher’s web pages, highlighting the attention that articles were receiving across social media, blogs and other platforms, and providing links so that users could click through to the sources.

In addition to research articles, Altmetric can track clinical trials, books and data uploaded onto websites, such as Figshare. Indeed, virtually anything is trackable online, even without a persistent digital identifier. Altmetric has enabled the World Cancer Research Fund, for example, to track attention to its blog via metadata embedded into the website.

Altmetric customers use the data in lots of different ways: academic institutions want to see attention broken down by author and department, pharma companies want to track not just their own products, but those of competitors, and government departments want to see whether the public are making use of policy documents, for example. The data can be variously used for assessment and insight gathering, monitoring, reporting, and switching tactics and strategy in relation to outputs. Explorer platforms allow publishers and institutions to access the full Altmetric database and enable customised reporting at department, group, and individual researcher levels.

Written by Penny Gray, Freelance Medical Writer

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We are building a library of free webcasts, like this one, for the global MedComms Community and others at http://www.networkpharma.tv and we’d welcome your suggestions for new topics and speakers.

Full details of this MedComms Networking event are at http://medcommsnetworking.com/event_030517.html

Ben’s presentation (PDF format) is at http://medcommsnetworking.com/presentations/mcleish_030517.pdf

Ben’s Linkedin page is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mcleish-4b2b56b/

More about Altmetric can be found at https://www.altmetric.com

[For the avoidance of doubt: this video is intended to be freely accessible to all. Please feel free to share and use however you like. Cheers, Peter Llewellyn, Director NetworkPharma Ltd and Founder of the MedComms Networking Community activity at http://www.medcommsnetworking.com]