Feature

Bringing article fulltext to your Impactstory profile

Your work’s impact helps define your identity as a scientist; that’s why we’re so excited about being the world’s most complete impact profile. But of course the content of your work is a key part of your identity, too.

This week, we’re launching a feature that’ll bring that content to your Impactstory profile: if there’s a free fulltext version of one of your articles, we’ll find it and automatically link to it from your profile.

We’ll be automatically checking tons of places to find where an article’s freely available:

  • Is the article in PMC?
  • Is it published in a journal listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals?
  • Is it published in a journal considered “open access” by Mendeley?
  • Does PubMed LinkOut to a free and full-text resource version?
  • If it’s in none of these, is it in our custom-built list of other open sources (including arXiv, figshare, and others)?

Of course, even with all these checks, we’re going to miss some sources–especially self-archiving in institutional repositories. So we’ll be improving our list over time, and you’ll be able to easily add your own linkouts when we miss them.

We’re excited to pull all this together; it’s another big step toward making your Impactstory profile a great place to share your scholarly identity online. Look for the release in a few days!

Who’s the tweetedest?

Formal citations are important, but it’s the informal interactions that really power the scientific conversation. Impactstory helps our users observe these. And since Monday, they’ve been able to observe them a lot more clearly: adding Twitter data from Altmetric.com has significantly improved our coverage, to the point where we’re confident saying Impactstory is most comprehensive source of scholar-level Twitter data in the world.

We wanted to play with all this data a little, so we thought it’d be fun to find the three most tweeted scholars on Impactstory.  Congrats to Ethan White, Ruibang Luo, and Brian Nosek: y’all are the Most Tweeted, with nearly 1000 tweets each mentioning your research papers, preprints, and datasets!

But of course, while these numbers are impressive they’re far from the whole story. By diving into the content of individual tweets, we can learn a lot more.

For instance, Ethan posted a grant proposal on figshare. This isn’t a traditional paper; it’s not even cited (yet). It’s not helping Ethan’s h-index. But it is making an impact, and looking at Twitter can help us see how. Zooming in, we can find this take from @ATredennick, a PhD candidate in ecology at Colorado State:

Thanks @ethanwhite for posting successful NSF proposal, http://bit.ly/MeKXsP . Very useful for early-career scientists.

That’s one tweet; there are 53 others for this product. Now we’re looking beyond simple counts and starting to tell data-driven stories–stories we’d never see otherwise.

Right now we’re only linking to a subset of tweets for each product, but we’re working to add the ability to see all of ‘em. We’re also going to be bringing data about tweet locations and authors (are you being tweeted by a fellow scientist? a blogger? your labmates?) right into your profile. If you’ve got other ideas for Twitter features, let us know!

In the meantime: congrats again to Brian, Ruibang, and Ethan! We’ll be sending them each a swag bag with an Impactstory “I am more than my h-index” tshirt, and stickers featuring our new logo.

Want to find who’s tweeting your science? Make your profile to find out!

Topsy ending data access

Last month, the Twitter data provider Topsy was acquired by Apple. No one seems real clear on what Apple tends to do with their new acquisition, but we can tell you what they won’t be doing: continuing to provider our Twitter data. They’ve informed us this service is being turned off early next month.

Thankfully, we’d already started looking into switching to Altmetric.com as our Twitter data provider. Not only are they still, you know, in business–they also offer significantly improved coverage of most research products.

However, Topsy’s exit does have implications for you, our users. First, although our twitter tracking for scholarly articles, preprints and datasets has improved thanks to Altmetric.com, we’re losing our ability to track tweets on other kinds of products like github and slideshare. Second, we need to disable our Twitter and WordPress Blog products: they relied heavily on Topsy data. Tweets and blog posts will stop displaying on profiles in the next few days.

We’re disappointed about losing these features. We know you loved those features and we did too.  As many folks have pointed out, one of the key challenges of altmetrics is securing persistent, open access to data (the same is true, for that matter, of bibliometrics in general). So we’ve planned for this sort of thing, but it’s still no fun.

The good news is that we’re still committed to these features, especially getting great impact metrics for users’ blogs and Twitter feeds. We’re looking into several replacement approaches now, and we’re optimistic. A lot depends on how much demand we get, so we can decide where to prioritize these. As always, if it matter to you, let us know; we’ll listen.

Impactstory partners with Altmetric.com

We’re thrilled to announce that starting today, Impactstory will be buying a new data stream: Twitter, G+, and Facebook data from Altmetric.com.

Altmetric have spent years working on the thorny problem of connecting tweets with articles. It’s a tough one: papers may be referred to by a dozen different URLs, a DOI, an arXiv ID, and more. But Altmetric have gotten very good at it–at this point, we believe they’re the best in the world. The upshot? Impactstory’s Twitter coverage just got way better. If you’ve got a profile, check it out: there’s a good chance you’ll see new tweets we hadn’t found before.

Along with tweets, we’ll also be leveraging Altmetric’s infrastructure to find mentions in several brand new environments. Is your scholarship being discussed on Reddit, g+, or Facebook? Starting today, Impactstory will let you know.

This is a big win for our users–both because you’ll see cool new data, and because the Impactstory development team can focus hard on adding features where we add the most value. It’s also kind of a cool moment for the nascent industry growing around altmetrics…we’re all starting to mature, focus, and build around our unique advantages.

Last but not least, Jason and Heather are both happy to be working with Altmetric’s founder and CEO, Euan Adie. He gets the Web, he gets how it’s transforming scholarship, and he’s a legit class act and good guy. So here’s to Euan, here’s to more and better data, and here’s to a successful and productive partnership!

Edit your products’ titles and authors

Screen Shot 2014-01-27 at 1.43.39 PMImpactstory does a lot behind the scenes to find relevant metadata for new products; unfortunately, however, we’re only as good here as the data we can find from publishers, Mendeley, and other sources. And sometimes this data’s wrong.

Consequently, one of our top-voted feature requests has been manual editing of titles and author lists, so folks can fix mistakes. We’re happy to announce that today we’re rolling this feature out: just log in to your profile, click the product you want to edit, and then click the “edit” button.

We’re working hard to make Impactstory a place that really represents our users, a place they can explain and show off their identity as scholars. We’ve still got a ways to go in making that vision a reality, but features like this, that you let you fine-tune the look of your profile, are a great start.

Profiles are getting faster

Our mantra here is to ship features quickly and optimize ’em later. And after spending a lot of frustrated time waiting for profiles to load (especially very large profiles), we decided it was officially “later” and set out to improve profile loading times last week.

We ended up moving a lot of the rendering code from Javascript to Python, where it’s both faster and more maintainable, and doing some caching. The result: profiles like Heather’s are now loading around five seconds faster; bigger profiles will see even larger improvements. The difference is especially pronounced when you switch back and forth between viewing the profile and zooming in to individual products: the return trip is now almost instant, which we’re really happy about.

There’s still a lot of room to improve loading times, especially on the first profile load, but we’re going to wait on this for now, at least until we get feedback requesting faster loads. That means we’ll be able to turn our attention to shipping new features…we’ve got some coming up next week we can’t wait to show y’all!

you asked, you got it: support for arXiv IDs

We love requests for new ImpactStory features.  The second-most requested feature at feedback.impactstory.org has been support for arXiv IDs.  So, starting today, you’ve got’em!

You can import your preprints by arXiv id — we’ll retrieve the title and author list, then look up all the metrics we can find.  Interestingly, arXiv is actively against sharing download stats, but maybe with enough encouragement from you they’ll update their policy?

Thanks for everyone who took the time to vote on the feature, and keep those requests coming!

introducing profile-based embedding

As you’ve noticed, we’ve been focusing hard on new features for ImpactStory profiles.  Today we announce another step towards a great impact profile experience:  a new, simple approach to embedding ImpactStory data on your own website.

An “Embed” link at the top of your profile provides simple HTML code to include in your website.  Just add the line to any webpage and, poof!  Your whole profile is there, with all of your products and their impacts.  You can see it in action on Ross Mounce’s website.

We’ll be decommissioning old-style embedding badges in a month, on January 17th 2014, to streamline our efforts.  We know many of you have included these stand-alone badges on your journal, lab, and personal websites — we’ve loved seeing them there!  We hope you transition to our new embedding model, if it works for you.

We’re deeply committed to great embedding for ImpactStory profiles, because, well, it’s your profile. It should live where you want it to, and look how you want it to look. So we’re excited about continuing to improve the embedding experience. Let us know at feedback.impactstory.org what additional features would help you share your ImpactStory profile in all the ways you want to!

Pull your blog posts (with pageviews!) into ImpactStory

Our blog is part of our scholarly identity, for many of us.  We discuss papers we’ve read, ponder issues we’ve been thinking about, and sometimes release our own early results. Wouldn’t it be great if we could showcase these mini publications on our CV, ideally linked to their readership and discussions in the blogosphere.

Good news: now it’s easy!  Starting today, your blog gets it’s own section on your ImpactStory profile. When you import a blog, we automatically find your most-tweeted posts and pull them into your profile, linked to their tweets, bookmarks, and other metrics. You can curate this list by adding and removing individual posts to feature the ones you’re most proud of.

Even better, if your blog is hosted on WordPress.com you’ll see still more metrics — comments, subscribers, and even pageviews!

We’re excited about the way this rounds out the story you can tell about yourself on your product list, and we think you will be too.  Go give it a try (and if you haven’t done so yet, pull in your top tweets, hook up your figshare account, and add some videos!).

Update: Topsy has ended data access, meaning this feature is no longer available for Impactstory profiles. We’re looking into ways to restore it as soon as we can. If you’re interested in this feature, please vote for it in our Feedback forum.

Highlight your best tweets

Do you tweet about your research?  If so, you know meaningful scholarly contributions and conversations happen on Twitter.  In fact, citation guidelines now specify how to cite a tweet [MLA, APA] — a sure indication that tweets are gaining acceptance as mainstream scholarly products.  Which is great… but your twitter contributions don’t make it on to your traditional CV.

We have a solution!  Starting today you can easily highlight your best tweets in your ImpactStory profile!  This allows others to see the work you are most proud of, and makes it easy for you to drill into your impact metrics for your own curiosity:

To get started, just import your Twitter account into ImpactStory.  This will automatically pull in your 10 most popular tweets and their related metrics.  You can also add specific tweets by URL.

We’re excited about this new way to showcase our online scholarly identity, and we think you will be too… give us feedback with your ideas for the future!

Update: Topsy has ended data access, meaning this feature is no longer available for Impactstory profiles. We’re looking into ways to restore it as soon as we can. If you’re interested in this feature, please vote for it in our Feedback forum.