Feature

What’s your pain?

We want to build a product users want.  No, actually, we want to build a product users *need*.  A product that solves pain, that solves problems.  Best way to know what the problems are?  Get out of the building and ask.

So, dear potential-future-users: where are you currently feeling real pain about tracking the impact of your research?  

Here are three potential places:

  • You are desperate to learn more about your impact for your own curiosity.
  • You put all of this time into your research, you really want your circle to know about it.  You need to share info about your impact.
  • You want to be rewarded for your impact when evaluated for hiring, promotion, grants, and awards.

What’s the rank order of these pains for you?  Are there others?  Tell us all about it so we can build the tool that you need: team@total-impact.org or @totalimpactdev.

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!

Jean-Claude tools

Here are the main libraries and other tools we’re using for Jean-Claude. Some are new for TI (Flask) some are old (Couch) and all are awesome:

  • Python 2.7
  • jQuery on the UI
  • CouchDB with the Python couchdb lib.
  • Flask as the lightweight web framework
  • BibJSON to describe bibliographic information
  • Supervisor to run and manage server processes
  • Beautiful (Stone) Soup for parsing xml and html
  • The Negotiator for content negotiation in the API
  • Memecached or maybe Redis for caching
  • JSONP? for serving API data

feedback wanted: updated api spec

We’ve been working on an updated api spec.  It is quite similar to our initial api but contains a few refinements to help us scale up.

For example, we’ll make namespaces explicit rather than implicit, so a PubMed identifier will always be referred to with a PMID prefix.  

We’ve also introduced the idea of total-impact identifiers — we affectionately call them tiids.

Javascript snippets will make embedding total-impact data into webpages as easy as pie.

Have a look at the new api spec and see what you think?  You can add thoughts, questions, and suggestions right on the google doc as comments.