On the lands that we study, we walk, and we live, we acknowledge and respect the traditional custodians and cultural knowledge holders of these lands.
There are several ways to engage with research outside of traditional metrics. Alternative measures complement citation-based metrics to help build a more complete picture of the impact of your research. They can be particularly helpful for recent publications or disciplines in the humanities and social sciences where traditional metrics may not be available.
Alternative metrics indicate how a research output has been shared, mentioned, or downloaded from online sources such as social media sites, blogs, mainstream media, and reference managers. This data starts accumulating as soon as your research output is published, providing a measure of the engagement, and attention, with your research sooner than traditional metrics.
If your research output is available for download in UOW’s open access repository, Research Online, navigate to each of your publications to locate download and view statistics, as well as alternative metrics from Altmetric.com.
This video (3:15) can show you how to navigate between your publications to retrieve the available metrics on your research outputs:
This video will take you through using Research Online, the University of Wollongong's Open Access repository, to determine alternative measures of impact by using the "download" and the "view" metrics that are embedded within each item that is in Research Online.
So to start the URL for Research Online is "ro.edu.au" and from here I'm going to use the browse or the search button to search for a UOW academic who has agreed to let me use their profile for this video and I'm going to group their name using quotation marks so that I'm getting their name rather than the instances of the word Jackie or the instances of the word Cameron.
I'm looking for Jackie Cameron as an author so I've put their name in with quotation marks and hit the search button. So from here I can see that there's 13 results under the name Jackie Cameron and you'll see under here that sometimes Jackie's name is highlighted, this is because she's the first author of these papers. On this one her name's not highlighted, she's not the first author so it's sort of sitting here under the name Louisa Handyside, but Jackie is a contributor to this research output.
So to find the the "download" and the "view" metrics I need to click on the title of this work and when the page loads, scroll down a little bit and we can see the usage metrix here on the right hand side of the page. It's had 53 views and 145 downloads. So we can also have a look at the altmetric.com information that is embedded into each item as well, so from this page you can see it has an alt metric attention score of 14. When you hover over the top of this, it gives you a little bit more information and actually allows you to click out to see more details in there. Once you've noted the usage metric here of this paper, you need to press the back button. Wait for this page to load up again and then click into another record to see the the alternative metrics that are in here again.
The way the platform works is, this is article by article so you need to go back and forth through all of your papers that are in Research Online to get those usage metrics, the downloads and the the views. Alternatively if you're after that information for a particular paper you could type in the details of the paper up here and then you could have a look at that paper in that way.
Altmetric collates the online mentions and shares of your research outputs from a range of sources into a score, which is represented by a donut shape, where colours represent the different types of attention.
Altmetric data is available through the database Dimensions. At UOW we’re using the free version, so we have access to data regarding publications, citations and the Altmetric Attention Score detailing social sharing and policy citations. You will need to sign in or create a free account.
This video (2:18) can show you how to navigate Dimensions to retrieve policy citations:
I'm going to take you through having a look at some alternative metrics that are available from this website dimensions.ai. It's a great website to have a look at grant information, policy citations, and policy documents—your publications in a very broad sense. Not just the publications that are listed in Scopus and Web of Science; for example, patents and clinical trials are included in this database.
To start, you go to dimensions.ai and then click on this button, 'Access Free Web App,' which will take you to the Dimensions database. To search for yourself, you click 'Researcher and more,' and then you're able to type in the name—your name. If you've got a more common name than the example that I'm using now, you can use the affiliation that's listed here to help you filter through the list of results. Select your name and then click on 'Limit To,' and then we'll just see the publications that Dimensions has for this author.
To make it easier to view the alternative metrics, change the sort from 'relevance' to 'altmetric attention score,' and then we'll see the ones with a higher number float to the top of the list. You can click the altmetric button—hover over the altmetric button—and you'll see where it's been mentioned in the news or somebody's blogged about this paper, and where it's been referenced in policy sources. And this is what I really wanted to show you with this video.
So when we go—when we click on the name of the publication, we can see a new window opens. We can see the name of the paper and the policy that it's been cited in. You can click through that policy; you can have a look at the context that they're citing your paper. Or sometimes it's just enough to know that it's been cited in a policy, so that you can reference that in a promotion application form, in a grant application form, where you're talking about the reach or the impact of your work outside of academia.
PlumX metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with individual research outputs in the online environment. PlumX metrics are divided into separate categories: citations (including policy citations), usage, captures, mentions, and social media.
PlumX data is available through the database Scopus.
On the lands that we study, we walk, and we live, we acknowledge and respect the traditional custodians and cultural knowledge holders of these lands.
