Author: Jason

load all your Google Scholar publications into total-impact

A lot of users have pointed out that it’s hard to get lists of articles into total-impact: you can cut and paste DOIs, but most people don’t have those on hand. Today we’re launching an awesome new feature to fix that: importing from Google Scholar “My Citations” profiles.

To use it, just visit your profile and click Actions->export, then “Export all my articles.” Save the file it gives you. Upload the file to total-impact in “Upload a BibTeX file” box when you create your collection (and of course, you can still add other research products from Slideshare, Github, Dryad, and elsewhere, too). In minutes, you can go from a narrow, old-fashioned impact snapshot to a rich, multi-dimensional image of your research’s diverse impacts.

Thanks to Google Scholar for making profiles easy to export, and CrossRef for their open API. This feature is still experimental (we only get articles with DOIs, for instance, so some are left out), and we’d love your feedback. Enjoy!

new metrics: number of student readers, citations by review articles, and more…

We’ve added some cool new metrics to total-impact:

  • number of citations by papers in PMC, 
  • number of citations by review papers in PMC, 
  • number of citations by editorials in PMC, 
  • the number of student readers in Mendeley (roughly, based on top-three reported job descriptions) 
  • the number of Mendeley readers from developing countries (again, roughly)
  • a “F1000 Yes” note if an article has been reviewed by F1000

See them in action in our sample collection.

These are exciting metrics for two reasons: they aren’t easily available elsewhere in this format, and we think they’ll be powerful signals about the impact flavor of research.

Thanks to PMC and Mendeley for making their data and filters available via an Open API: this sort of innovation isn’t otherwise possible.

If you have a current collection on total-impact and want to see these metrics, hit the “update” button.  New collections will all include these metrics.  Enjoy!

Megasprint!

As of yesterday, I (Jason) have joined Heather in Vancouver for what we’re calling the Megasprint: two months of 12hr-day, take-no-prisoners, hardcore hacking on total-impact. We’re working toward the mid-September release of our next version, codenamed Bruce (total-impact sounds like an action movie name…why fight it). 

Bruce will be our first heavily-publicized release (there will be t-shirts!), and will feature collection-level analysis and visualization tools, data from tons of new providers, and support for collections tracking hundreds of thousands of articles, datasets, software projects, and more. And of course the ability to knock Alan Rickman off a building.

We’re super excited about all we’ll be able to get done in the next, intense two months…stay tuned!

Tell the NIH that grant biosketches need impact info

The NIH wants to hear your thoughts on how it should modify its biosketch requirements. Feedback due Friday JUNE 29th 2012, midnight EDT.

The request for information is wide open, but specifically requests feedback on the idea that a researcher’s biosketch could “include a short explanation of their most important scientific contributions.”  

Sounds like a chance for scientists to tell their impact story!  Good idea? And do you think impact stories should include impact metrics?  If so, tell the NIH!

Right now the NIH biosketch instructions only include impact signalling through journal titles.  

Some ideas for new biosketch instructions:

  1. explicitly encourage all types of research output as publications, including software and datasets
  2. explicitly welcome indications of impact, like citations, downloads and bookmarking counts
  3. consider identifying articles only by authors, title, and ID/url rather than journal

Add your voice:  here’s the form.  We understand that the group receiving these responses is empowered to make changes.

(ht to Rebecca Rosen.  More info at ResearchRemix.  CC0.)

total-impact All The Time and IRL

Heather is going to be full-time total-impact starting August 1st!

For the last two years I have been a DataONE postdoc, with discretionary time for synergistic activities like total-impact.  I went officially 50/50 when the Sloan grant started May 1st…. and have now revised that plan to be 100% total-impact starting in six weeks.  

My passion for data remains. This move is because I believe research data needs better tracking tools to be fully appreciated and useful.  It needs context.  Context around how a dataset is collected, but also context around how the dataset is received by the community and what difference it has made.  As part of our commitment to diverse research products, total-impact collects metrics on dataset discussion and reuse and makes these tracks broadly available for mashups and remixes.  We’ll be doing much more of this in the coming months.

(I would talk about how great it has been to be a DataONE postdoc, but this isn’t a goodbye post — I still have papers to finish! 🙂 )

In related and similarly-awesome news, Jason is relocating to Vancouver for August and September, for total-impact All The Time and IRL 2012.  There will be t-shirts.


ti out and about

These are exciting days in total-impact land:

  • We’re participating (and speaking!) in StartUp Science this weekend. Check out the lineup: PeerJ! Mendeley! Academia.edu! ScienceExchange! total-Impact! OAMonday! and more. Ambitious innovative research tools are going to be game-changing for the way scientists work.
  • altmetrics12 is next week! Jason has been one of the main movers and shakers in pulling together a stellar attendee group: publishers, funders, tool-builders, researchers. Follow along at #altmetrics12.
  • we can barely sleep at night due to excitement about our new codebase… stay tuned or spy on our commits for teasers.


Welcome to Plum Analytics!

I (Jason) recently watched Andrea Michalek’s presentation describing Plum Analytics, and I’m excited to see yet another altmetrics tool being rolled out. I have to admit that it’s still a bit surreal to see Real Grown-Up People talking about altmetrics as a viable commercial product, after coining the word less than 24 months ago. But I think this modest idea is just one entry point into something much bigger: a growing awareness of the gap between our current, 1600’s-vintage scholcomm system, and the astonishing potential of web-native communication.

I quite liked the screenshots I saw. The tabular presentation of altmetrics data has a lot of potential, and I like it better than total-impact’s approach in many ways. I loved the identity-entry workflow, and liked the collection-level visualizations at the top of the page. I’m must less impressed with the wheel-style visualization; why the circle? Stuff’s harder to read, and harder compare without an obvious baseline. Lacking a clear visual metaphor as a justification, this feels a bit chartjunky to me. Of course, this is just their early prototype and will no doubt improve substantially.

Andrea did a great job with the questions, particularly in steering folks away from the “one number to rule them all” approach. The strength of altmetrics is not prefab reductionism: it’s presenting a diverse panel of metrics and empowering users (not providers) to mix and synthesize them.

Indeed, I reckon supporting these analytics control panels will be a very profitable business; they’ll soon be able to build off the metrics stream total-impact will expose for free. Although there is (in the short term) revenue to be had by simply collecting altmetrics, I’m wary of trusting this to for-profits; I think it is infrastructure that’s better handled by a free, open, trusted nonprofit. If we’re successful, it will be 🙂

Keeping metrics free

Sustainability is important for the kind of infrastructure we want to build with total-impact. The obvious way to do this is to pass along our costs to folks who want to use the metrics, and we’ve discussed ways to do this.

However, over the last week, we’ve reached an important decision: in addition to keeping our source code and planning process open, we’ll keep our metrics free and open, too. We won’t charge for access or use.

This may seems quixotic, but it’s not motivated by blind “information wants to be free” fanpersonism. Rather, it’s motivated by our underlying goal for this project: not just a nifty new way to measure impact (although it’s that, too), but rather the base for a fundamentally transformed, web-native scholarly communication system. 

The value in selling altmetrics is dwarfed by the value of what we can build using them. And we can only build these systems if the metrics themselves can flow like water between and among evaluators, readers, recommendation engines, authors, and all the other cogs of this scholarly communication system. 

We’re both believers in The Market. There’s lots of money to be made in the coming post-journal world; we support those folks trying to make it. But we see that the market is not going to provide the kind of infrastructure that the next generation of recommendation and tools will need.

So over the next few months, we’ll be forming a non-profit foundation, and continuing to pursue philanthropic funding through at least the next year (while still looking at innovative ways to develop additional revenue streams). The Sloan Foundation have seen the value in what we’re doing; we think that Sloan and others will be excited to continue supporting the vision of a comprehensive, timely, free, and open metrics infrastructure. 

We scholars have travelled the route of trusting our basic decision-making infrastructure to a for-profit before. Despite everyone’s best intentions, it’s not worked out so well. We’re excited about helping to start a new era of metrics along a different course.

Open impact metrics need #openaccess. Please sign.

Something exciting is going on.  A petition for increased access to the scientific literature is gathering steam.  If it gets 25k signatures in 30 days — and it looks like it will get many more — the proposal will go to Obama’s desk for integration into policy.

Total-Impact urges you to sign this petition and share it with others.  We have 🙂

Improved access to the research literature is *essential* if we want innovative systems to track the impact of scholarly research products within the scholarly ecosystem.  

As far as we know, there is only one cross-publisher open computer-accessible source for citations: PubMed Central. And the only cross-publisher search of full text that can be reused by computer programs? Comes from PubMed Central.  PubMed Central is awesome, but it only has NIH-funded biomedical literature. Scholarship needs these resources for all research literature.  This petition is an important step.

Please go sign the petition and spread the word.  #altmetrics #OAMonday #openaccess #theFutureIsComing