For many of us, prosecco seems to have become the sine qua non of any gathering, combining as it does the popping cork, light fizz and often considerable price benefit compared to champagne. Celebrated on 13 August each year, it offers a chance for prosecco producers to market their wines, and for the rest of us to, well, enjoy them!

But aside from the marketing fluff, what’s going on academically with prosecco? Dimensions and Altmetric – as well as being fantastically powerful tools to aid deep investigation of research topics – can also offer insight into almost any field of study. So, what can we glean from recent studies on prosecco?

In Figure 1, we can see that the number of articles that mention ‘prosecco’ has steadily grown in the last decade, with a pronounced increase in 2021. However, this seemed to tail off in 2022, so perhaps interest in the topic has started to wane. This almost exactly mirrors global sales of prosecco and Italian wine in general, which have tailed off in 2022 after performing well during the pandemic.

However, if we break it down by the number of articles published by Sustainable Development Goals – one of the most useful ways of delineating research on Dimensions – we can see that while there has been a drop in research related to Good Health and Well Being (SDG #3) and Life on Land (#15), there has been a marked increase in research on prosecco related to SDG #13, namely Climate Action. This perhaps reflects overall increased focus in this topic, particularly when related to food production where climate change is impacting on vines and crops, and any ability to meet increased demands.

Certainly the reporting on prosecco-related research is maintaining its upwards trajectory, as we can see from Figure 3, which shows a steady increase in citations of research in this area. As there is a lag between citations and publications, we may see this drop away in future if the decline in research on prosecco remains on a downward trend.

When we look at the influence of the research outside academia, we may have expected a similar continual rise, however data from Altmetric shows if anything a steeper decline than we saw in research output. This could be explained in part by the much shorter lead time that digital influence exhibits compared to citations, but it could also be a strong indicator that prosecco research has had its place in the sun, and academic interest has gone rather flat.

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About the Author

Simon Linacre, Head of Content, Brand & Press | Digital Science

Simon has 20 years’ experience in scholarly communications. He has lectured and published on the topics of bibliometrics, publication ethics and research impact, and has recently authored a book on predatory publishing. Simon is also a COPE Trustee and ALPSP tutor, and holds Masters degrees in Philosophy and International Business.

The post Has Prosecco research lost its fizz? appeared first on Digital Science.

Celebrating Women’s History Month

In this short series of blogs, Digital Science is using modern tools to assess three women and their research legacies to amplify their achievements during Women’s History Month. We saw earlier this month the major contributions made by Marie Maynard Daly and Rita Levi-Montalcini, and in the final part we review the impact made by Dr Elsie Widdowson in her long career. 

The first remarkable thing to note about Dr Widdowson is the change in disciplines she covered in her early work. At first she was interested in plants, and her first PhD at Imperial College involved long-term experimentation on carbohydrates in apples. But following that she switched from plants to humans, and in particular the biochemistry of our bodies. Firstly she looked at the functioning of kidneys, and then moved on to the relatively new field of dietetics. It appears that these changes were in part due to difficulties in securing a long-term position in what would have been a male-dominated era. 

The second thing to note here is that, working with co-researcher Dr Robert McCance, their publications on nutrition quickly became the seminal text for those studying the area in the post-war period. Recognising her expertise, she helped the UK government formulate a plan to increase vitamin intake into people’s diets which were restricted due to rationing. Much of her work focused on the health of the fetus and babies according to the milk they drank, and this work was not just restricted to people. Gestation and growth patterns and how they were related to nutrition were studied in everything from elephants to blackbirds to pigs. However, the relative health of people in that period will still be felt today by those still living and the families they were able to bring up. 

The third impressive aspect of her career is not only her productivity over such a long period, but the number of major contributions across so many different fields. Recently the Dimensions database was upgraded to include the updated Fields of Research (FoR) categorisations used in Australia and New Zealand. In the course of her career, Dr Widdowson published 159 articles – 63 of them with her long-time collaborator Dr McCance – and around two thirds of these were in her core area of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences (see chart). One might expect most authors to then have a few papers here and there in adjacent FoRs, but Dr Widdowson has 40 papers in Agricultural, Veterinary and Food Science, 32 in Health Sciences and seven in Environmental Sciences. She also has a handful of papers in other areas, but they are in no way adjacent, publishing articles in areas such as Engineering and History, Heritage and Archaeology.

Later in her career, Dr Widdowson retired from work in one lab only to take up a position at another lab in Cambridge to further her research career. It is perhaps fitting that when she published her final article – some 64 years after her first when she was well into her 90s – it was a dedication to her co-author Dr McCance after he died following a similarly long and distinguished career.

About the Author

Simon Linacre, Head of Content, Brand & Press | Digital Science

Simon has 20 years’ experience in scholarly communications. He has lectured and published on the topics of bibliometrics, publication ethics and research impact, and has recently authored a book on predatory publishing. Simon is also a COPE Trustee and ALPSP tutor, and holds Masters degrees in Philosophy and International Business.

The post Elsie Widdowson: Long-lasting impact on health appeared first on Digital Science.

Professor Rita Levi-Montalcini

We are looking in this series of blogs at three women and their legacy to understand a little about what they achieved through their research, and how these achievements live on after their death as other researchers use their work and build on it in different ways. Earlier this month we looked at Marie Maynard Daly, and in the final part will assess the work of Elsie Widdowson. But in this post we will focus on one of the most famous Italian scientists to have ever lived, Professor Rita Levi-Montalcini.

For many people, they may know the name of Italian neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini for her curious first in the pantheon of Nobel Prize winners, which while notable, does mask the many great achievements that went before. You see, Prof. Levi-Montalcini became the first Nobel Prize winner to ever reach 100 years of age when she hit that remarkable milestone in 2009. While this is notable, at the time the scientist was still representing her country as a Senator for Life in the Italian parliament – just one of a long line of achievements throughout her life.

According to her Nobel biography, Prof. Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin in 1909 and started tertiary education late. However, she soon made up for lost time, studying in the same institution as other notable biomedical scientists before deciding on a life devoted to research rather than becoming a medical doctor. This stage of her life coincided with World War II, but undeterred she maintained a focus on her studies, experimenting on chick embryos in a makeshift lab set up in her bedroom. This research was the basis for much of her work in later life, which eventually saw her leave Italy to work at Washington University in St Louis where she would spend much of her career before returning to Italy to retire.

When we look at her research now through the Dimensions database, we can see that she had a prolific career, with 171 publications right up until her death in 2012. In that time, her articles garnered over 19,000 citations, with several articles being cited over 1,000 times each. Much of her work focused on the ‘nerve growth-promoting factor’, which was an area of research she appeared to own in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 1986 with her colleague Stanley Cohen.

Several of her articles zeroed in on the ‘nerve growth factor’, and an article with this simple term as the title was the second most highly cited article of her career with over 1,800 citations according to Dimensions. Interestingly, the most cited article was a kind of review article titled ‘The nerve growth factor 35 years later’ which has been cited more than 2,600 times. Many believe review articles can attract more citations than pure research articles, and this may be the case here.

Later in her career, Prof. Levi-Montalcini returned to her native Italy to direct numerous research labs dedicated to neurological sciences, and she even helped set up the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, serving as its president despite her advancing years. She died aged 103, but becoming a centenarian was just one of many achievements in her long life.

About the Author

Simon Linacre, Head of Content, Brand & Press | Digital Science

Simon has 20 years’ experience in scholarly communications. He has lectured and published on the topics of bibliometrics, publication ethics and research impact, and has recently authored a book on predatory publishing. Simon is also a COPE Trustee and ALPSP tutor, and holds Masters degrees in Philosophy and International Business.

The post Rita Levi-Montalcini: A long life of achievement appeared first on Digital Science.

Daniel Hook, one of the co-founders of Symplectic and now CEO of Digital Science, reflects on the past 20 years of growth and change at Symplectic – and what makes it such a special partner within the research community.

Twenty years is a long time in tech but a short time in the world of research. There are other, perhaps more appropriate measures by which to measure the age of Symplectic: in UK terms, Symplectic is ‘three REFs’ old, from a New Zealand perspective it is just two PBRFs, and in an Australian context it is four (and a bit) ERAs old. From a software development perspective, Symplectic is six major versions old. From a client perspective, it is more than 120 installations old. From a personal perspective, it is two CEOs old – indeed, around Christmas this year, I will become the second-longest serving CEO of Symplectic, having moved into the Digital Science leadership team in 2015 and handed the reins of Symplectic over into the capable hands of Jonathan Breeze.

As with almost any 20-year-old, this one, which was started by four friends who happened to share an office while doing their PhDs, has grown so as to be almost completely unrecognisable. And yet, there are things that were important to us when we founded the company 20 years ago that remain at the heart of what we do now. I like to think that there are two guiding principles in what Symplectic does: firstly, whatever we do, we do it collaboratively; secondly, we want to save people time. There are other things that flow from this: bringing an academic perspective; helping people to make better decisions; ensuring that data are re-used; making sure that we preserve key aspects of choice in how users of Elements are able to work with the data that it contains; interoperability between systems and so on. At the core each of these things is an expression of those two guiding principles.

Setting collaboration at the centre of Symplectic’s world has created a very special ethos in the company, as both those inside the company and those who work with Symplectic’s team will attest. Symplectic’s story is not just about those of us who founded the company or those of us who have been part of the team – it is a story that is shared with Symplectic’s wider community. There are simply too many people to name who have played pivotal roles in making Symplectic the company that it is today. I know this because, in preparation for this blog, I tried to write such a list and found myself with more than 50 names of people simply from my time as CEO in the first ten years of Symplectic. And, that list specifically did not include the many colleagues and friends who were actually part the Symplectic team itself over that period. I can only imagine that Jonathan Breeze, my successor, has a list at least as long as the company has expanded significantly under his tenure. All these contributors have made Symplectic what it is today. 

Symplectic enjoys a special level of collaboration with its clients, partners, friends, and colleagues. So many over the years have taken a long view – not solely focusing on their own project or installation but giving their time and knowledge generously. This has not only created a company and a piece of software, but also a shared store of deep domain knowledge. Every relationship has gone toward ‘paying it forward’ so that the broader Symplectic community benefits from the innovations and ideas of each participant. When once, in the early phase of Symplectic’s development around 2008, a perceptive UK-based client observed, “You’re really just centralising development funding from many universities so that you can give us a great product and keep it moving forward in a way that we can afford”, they were not wrong.

Our second focus of saving people time sits as a key part of this collaborative relationship. In that regard, Symplectic has moved from serving a single institution in 2003 to being fortunate enough to collaborate with institutions around the world to help them save time for their researchers.

Symplectic’s work is trusted around the world, saving time every day for more than 500,000 academics and administrators in 18 countries. The clients of Symplectic hold more than 8.8m distinct publications sourced from different data sources, saving academic and administrative time every time an article is added to their Symplectic Elements system, full text is deposited, or data is reused in other systems to inform decisions, help annual reviews or advertise the expertise of colleagues to potential partners around the world. With the help of Dimensions, I estimate that:

• Just over 7% of global annual output is recorded by organisations in a Symplectic Elements system in an automated way that minimises the time to rekey research metadata records.
• 23% of global green open access articles are associated with at least one Symplectic Elements instance, saving time for academics to deposit their work into institutional repositories.
• 17.5% of global citations land on articles stored in Symplectic Elements instances, while 15.5% of Nature papers are captured in Elements instances.
• Approximately 64% of articles associated with Symplectic’s clients have an Altmetric mention (compared to a global average of 27%).
• 72.5% of New Zealand’s research article output is captured in a Symplectic Elements system, as well as 74% of funder-acknowledging publications, and almost 81% of New Zealand’s University-produced research.

It has been an honour to work with the Symplectic team over the last 20 years. To see their progress, their dedication, and their spirit. As you see, they have carved out a unique path and make a real impact in the world with the people that they support. Here’s to the next 20! 

And, of course, to borrow a phrase… Vive la Symplectic! 

This post was originally published on the Symplectic website here.

About the Author

Daniel Hook, CEO | Digital Science

Daniel Hook is CEO of Digital Science, co-founder of Symplectic, a research information management provider, and of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). A theoretical physicist by training, he continues to do research in his spare time, with visiting positions at Imperial College London and Washington University in St Louis.

The post Symplectic at 20: Thoughts from Digital Science’s CEO appeared first on Digital Science.

For many researchers, the data behind their work often only tells half the story. This is the case with Marie Maynard Daly, a trailblazer in so many different ways, and the subject in the first of our March series to celebrate Women’s History Month.

Left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm once said that, “History is being invented in vast quantities.” Indeed, one need only look at the groaning History section in any good bookshop to realise there’s an almost infinite number of perspectives and realisations of every facet of human history. As we celebrate Women’s History Month in 2023, it is perhaps time we took the opportunity to utilise new technology in trying to understand more about those who led the way for women scientists of today.

In this series of blogs we look at three women and their research legacy to understand what they achieved – and continue to achieve – through their research, as well as fill in the gaps around their lives and the challenges they had to overcome. Later this month we will look at Rita Levi-Montalcini and Elsie Widdowson, but first we will turn our attention to perhaps the most important woman of colour in science in the 20th Century, Marie Maynard Daly.

Marie Daly was born in New York and attended a local college during the Second World War and then completed her Master’s degree in just a year. She then went on to record a staggering number of firsts for black woman scientists:

• Marie was the first African American woman to gain a PhD in chemistry in the US
• The first African American to be awarded a PhD from Columbia University
• She was one of the scientists who helped discover the link between cholesterol and clogged arteries

Early in her career, Dr Daly won a highly prestigious grant from the American Cancer Society that enabled her to work at the Rockefeller Institute of Medicine, which is where she met and started working with Alfred Mirsky. She went on to co-author a number of her articles with him, and was involved in research on the composition of the cell nucleus which was acknowledged by James Watson and Francis Crick in their 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine speech.

Understanding the influence of someone’s research from over half a century ago can be difficult. However, by using Dimensions and Altmetric we can get a sense of how research from the past lives on in research in the here and now. 

According to Dimensions, Marie Daly authored at least 10 papers over her career, which have been cited over 500 times in total. Her most cited paper – ‘Synthesis of Protein in the Pancreas’ (1953) – has been cited 145 times, however none of these have appeared recently. If, however, we search Dimensions for mentions of Marie Daly, we see that there have been almost 100 articles about her garnering over 1,000 citations, with a large spike in 2021 – such as this article in 2021 recognising Dr Daly’s contribution.

Altmetric can allow us to look more broadly at the context and impact of her research. According to the Altmetric tool, her work still garners mentions across a range of online channels, from Twitter to blogs and Wikipedia pages. Like many trailblazers, it is only years later that we can appreciate the importance of their work, and understand their struggles – Alfred Mirsky, who Marie worked with for many years, published 90 articles with over 10,000 citations to date. How much more recognition could Marie and other pioneers have gained had they been working on a level playing field? At least their struggle to overcome inequalities can be appreciated now, and celebrated during events such as Women’s History Month.

About the Author

Simon Linacre, Head of Content, Brand & Press | Digital Science

Simon has 20 years’ experience in scholarly communications. He has lectured and published on the topics of bibliometrics, publication ethics and research impact, and has recently authored a book on predatory publishing. Simon is also a COPE Trustee and ALPSP tutor, and holds Masters degrees in Philosophy and International Business.

The post Marie Maynard Daly: A Woman of Firsts appeared first on Digital Science.

PROGRAMME FOR APAC SHOWCASE 2023

Day 1 – Tuesday 28 February 2023

Day 2 – Wednesday 1 March 2023

Morning Sessions

Afternoon Concurrent Session – Altmetric

Afternoon Concurrent Session – Dimensions

Day 3 – Thursday 2 March 2023

Morning Sessions

Afternoon Concurrent Session – Figshare

Afternoon Concurrent Session – Symplectic

The post Digital Science APAC Showcase 2023: Programme appeared first on Digital Science.

About the Author

Simon Linacre, Head of Content, Brand & Press | Digital Science

Simon has worked in scholarly publishing for almost 20 years. His background is in journalism, and he has been published in academic journals on the topics of bibliometrics, publication ethics and research impact. 

The post Is research reaching the reader? appeared first on Digital Science.

For many members of our research community, a new term is accompanied by many other novel opportunities. Perhaps you’ll be teaching a new course. Maybe you will be starting a long-awaited new research project. Have you finally found the perfect excuse to buy that new notebook you’ve had your eye on? Of course you have. Treat yourself!

While some things have remained unchanged during this pandemic, many of our regular research, teaching and learning activities have become more challenging. We’ve navigated new virtual learning environments, tried not to break expensive, remotely accessible lab equipment, and attended conferences from home while simultaneously juggling life admin, often physically as well as metaphorically.

At Digital Science, we offer a range of solutions that help keep your research going during these interesting times, and even when we return to that long-awaited ‘normal’. As we head into a brand new term, here are just some of the many ways that we can support you, our research community, whether you’re returning to campus or labs, or whether you’re continuing to work from home.

We’ve got a whole page dedicated to our COVID-19 initiatives, all designed to help you navigate your way through the COVID-19 crisis. Use our free search for COVID-19 related research outputs in Dimensions to discover the latest research, host your lecture slides, notes, conference outputs and research data on Figshare, write up your results with your collaborators wherever they are in the world using Overleaf, plan your next research project using Symplectic’s Research Funding Solution, find books relevant to your research using Altmetric, or prepare for your next research role with Scismic.

In more recent developments, Writefull’s new Full Edit mode helps you to proofread your scientific texts. Full Edit mode delivers the best AI-based language feedback you’ll find – it is even tailored to scientific writing, so you know that your research outputs are going to be impactfully worded.

As a researcher, being able to quickly find relevant information is crucial. Dimensions provides free access to over 120 million publications and preprints to help you find exactly what you need, quickly and easily. Furthermore, its in-built analytical tools also help you gain actionable insights to help you guide your research in the right direction. Find out more in this introduction for researchers or dive right in using this search box:

Dive in to our comprehensive research database:

Dimensions

Dimensions is updated every 24 hours, and includes over 120 million publications, as well as datasets, grants, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents, helping you not only find the most relevant research information, but also understand the wider context within which your research sits.

ReadCube’s Papers App is your all-in-one literature management tool designed to keep the clutter off your desk so you can spend more time focusing on your research. Papers allows you to read and annotate your research literature, share your papers with collaborators, and cite your fundamental research quickly and easily in your own research publications.

What about when it comes to reporting on the outputs and impact of your research and teaching? Symplectic Elements helps you showcase all of your academic achievements and activities by collecting and curating research information in an easy-to-maintain search and discovery interface. Use Elements to demonstrate impact and expertise, discover internal and external collaboration, find mentorship opportunities, and easily dive into connections across institutional networks.

These are just some of the ways we are helping support our researcher community. If you want to know more about how our tools can help you, head to our website or get in touch with us by email or on Twitter. We’d love to hear about how we’re helping you make a difference.

We wish you a great start to the new term!

The post Back to school – how our tools can help your research appeared first on Digital Science.

In honour of the tenth anniversary of the Altmetrics Manifesto, Altmetric has published The State of Altmetrics, which explores a decade of innovation and growth in the field. The report also features contributions from leading thinkers on topics including:

• Ethical uses of altmetrics
• Using machine learning to improve altmetrics
• Altmetrics as “sensors” to detect the spread of disease
• What makes researchers more likely to use altmetrics 
• Predictions for the future of altmetrics

Download Now

The post The state of altmetrics appeared first on Digital Science.

As a medical affairs professional or publications planner in the pharmaceutical industry, we understand that you need to demonstrate the impact of the work you do. Some questions you may ask yourself might include:

• How can I explain to my managers and CMO the full reach of the articles I write, beyond counting citations?
• Is it possible to know what patients and doctors are saying about the research I publish for my company?

Until very recently, these questions were nearly impossible to answer. But with the rise of altmetrics (“alternative metrics” from the social web that help authors understand who is talking about their research and what they are saying), it is now easier than ever to identify key opinion leaders (KOLs) and their online equivalents, Digital Online Influencers (DOIs). In partnership with experts at medical affairs consultancy IMPRINT Science, we have tested and identified key tactics for using altmetrics to measure the value of your medical affairs publishing efforts.

Download our whitepaper today to find out how altmetrics can help you.

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The post Measuring the value of medical affairs appeared first on Digital Science.