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

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Developed in collaboration with over 100 leading research organisations around the world, Dimensions is a unique platform combining data about publications, data sets, grants, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents. Our database spans the broader global scientific landscape to enable individual researchers as well as research funders, research organizations, and publishers to discover, analyse, and understand multiple aspects of the research life cycle.

In this chapter, Juergen Wastl introduces the development and deployment of the Dimensions platform and describes the breadth of available functionality with a focus on bibliometric applications and question sets that can be applied to the academic and broader outcomes of research, and gather insights to inform future strategy.

Read the Chapter

The post A Bibliometrician Toolbox appeared first on Digital Science.

Research metrics, closely related to statistics and network analysis, benefit greatly from visualizations. This chapter, written by Helene Draux, introduces some guidelines for visualizations before describing the visualizations frequently used.

Helene introduces Chart Chooser and then considers the characteristics of the data. This includes either static or interactive graphs that are common in statistics, which she complements with advanced graphs more able to represent the links between scholarly objects. These flow diagrams are the opportunity to get an overview of the problem and dig deeper in it.

Read the Chapter

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Using the 900k+ publications, Hélène Draux carried out a bibliometric coupling analysis which identified clusters, which were then organised into 28 groups. The groups were named during a workshop organised with mental health research. Hélène presented this work on an
interactive network, which could be used to understand where Australian research is

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We offer free access to Dimensions for non-commercial scientometric research projects.

• Dimensions users can export data in bibliometric mapping formats, making it easy to use the data in popular tools like VOSviewer and CiteSpace.
• Dimensions API Lab and the Advanced Training series provide open tools the community can use in their analyses.
• Create your own visualisations to help tell stories by curating data into a form that is easier to understand. Dimensions brings your data to life.

 

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The state of altmetrics

The State of Altmetrics explores a decade of innovation and growth in the field of alternative metrics.

A Bibliometrician Toolbox

Juergen Wastl describes the breadth of Dimension’s data with a focus on bibliometric applications.

Visualization of Research Metrics

Helene Draux, introduces some guidelines for data visualizations.

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The Dimensions Scientometrics User Group brings together researchers from around the world that share a passion for the scholarly study of research productivity, impact, collaboration, and innovation.

The group considers how our tools can help to drive improvements in the fields of scientometrics, research management, and science policy.

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How our tools are being used

Studying the accumulation velocity of altmetric data tracked by Altmetric.com

Open Access and Altmetrics in the pandemic age: Forescast analysis on COVID-19 literature

Conservation Research Is Not Happening Where Needed

Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

#MeToo and the Scientometrics of Sexual Harassment

Scaling Scientometrics: Dimensions on Google BigQuery as an infrastructure for large-scale analysis

Real-time bibliometrics: Dimensions as a resource for analysing aspects of COVID-19 (Data Sets)

Defining Data & The New Scientometrics (Webinar)

The post scientometrics appeared first on Digital Science.

In this paper published in Frontiers Research Metrics and Analytics, Daniel W Hook, Simon J Porter, Hélène Draux and Christian T Herzog propose the concept of “real-time” bibliometrics as a new capability for researchers, policymakers and analysts across the sector.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted a different set of needs to analyze trends in scholarship as they occur: Real-time bibliometrics. The combination of full-text search, daily data updates, a broad set of scholarly objects including pre-prints and a wider set of data fields for analysis, broadens opportunities for a different style of analysis. A subset of these emerging capabilities is discussed and three basic analyses are presented as illustrations of the potential for real-time bibliometrics.

Read more

The post Dimensions as a Resource for Analyzing COVID-19 appeared first on Digital Science.

Mike Taylor is Head of Metrics Development at Digital Science. Before joining us he spent many years working in Elsevier’s R&D group and in the Metrics and Analytics Team. Mike works with many community groups, including FORCE11, RDA and NISO, and is well known in the scholarly metrics community. He’s also notorious amongst the Oxford theatrical scene as an actor, producer and director with ElevenOne Theatre. In his spare time he provides the entertainment for many a hen night with the murder-mystery company, Smoke and Mirrors. Mike is studying for a PhD in alternative metrics at the University of Wolverhampton.

MeToo and the Scientometrics of Sexual Harassment

Until the Harvey Weinstein scandal of October 2017, the field of sexual harassment will have been unknown to most academics and bibliometricians. Indeed, the fact that it is a known topic of funding and research – albeit on a very small scale indeed – will have largely been a mystery to most of us. A chance conversation with a colleague who wanted to look at the influence of feminist theory lead us to examine the field of sexual harassment, and the influence of the #MeToo phenomenon on research funding and focus. This sheds a particular light on the interaction between academia and society, the need for readiness and a willingness to adapt to new circumstances amongst the academic community, and the way in which social media can shape and communicate public discourse in a research field.

Examination of Google search engine queries for the terms “sexual harassment” and “MeToo” produces an interesting graph with several features. The two most prominent peaks for ‘MeToo’, a term that had previously not been widely used, occur in October 2017 and late 2018. Although queries around ‘MeToo’ fall quite sharply in both cases, it remains a substantial search query. The ‘MeToo’ phenomenon has had a clear impact in searches related to sexual harassment, boosting the number of queries by around 25% compared to the baseline average. It is interesting to note that the second peak in 2018 doesn’t have any effect on the volume of searches around ‘sexual harassment’, which remains relatively steady during this time.

Figure 1 Worldwide search engine results for ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘MeToo’

If we dive deeper into this data, we can start to make more sense of it. By filtering the data to show only results from the USA, the second peak disappears. We can clearly see the direct influence the volume of searches for ‘MeToo’ has had on the volume of searches for ‘sexual harassment’. Following an increased number of searches for ‘MeToo’, we see an even more dramatic increase in the number of searches carried out for ‘sexual harassment’. This trend is common for most European and predominantly English-speaking countries.

Figure 2 USA-located search engine results for ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘MeToo’

Figure 3 India-located search engine results for ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘MeToo’

So what about the second peak? Where does this come from? Further analysis reveals that the late 2018 peak in global searches was a down to separate wave of the #MeToo phenomenon which occurred in India. Although its impact on Google search volume was larger than the original October 2017 peak, it did not result in a long-term increase in searches for ‘sexual harassment’ in India, nor was there any sustained rise in the number of ‘MeToo’ searches in this country.

This analysis shows that the #MeToo phenomenon was a global phenomenon, but one that has had different qualities and different levels of impact in different countries around the world. In the USA, UK, and other countries, #MeToo appears to have unlocked a substantial discourse around sexual harassment; in other countries, it has not had that effect. Interestingly however, from a scientometric perspective, #MeToo has also had an additional effect: this social movement has stimulated explosive growth in research on sexual harassment.

The altmetric data for research in this space shows a number of interesting trends in discourse in this field, and in particular shines a light on activity within different communities. Using the Timeline feature in Altmetric Explorer, we can see that the number of tweets linking to research being carried out in this area largely mirrors the volume of related searches in the USA: they rise dramatically in October 2017, and remain at this higher level. In this case, it is possible that the higher volume of research being published may lead to increased levels of Twitter engagement in itself.

Figure 4 Tweets linking to research about ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘MeToo’ in Altmetric

The number of mentions about this research in mainstream media and blogs shows a less dramatic trend, but nevertheless shows consistently higher coverage in the months following October 2017. Interestingly, it also shows a separate phenomenon, not easily visible in these graphs due to lack of space; the growth of discourse about this research area in the two years preceding the Weinstein scandal. This growth is reflected in the volume of research output in the years 2015-2017 when research volume doubled, albeit from a very low number).

If you spend just a few moments looking at this research on the free version of Dimensions, you will have a good grasp of the nature of work being carried on in this space: very practical, multidisciplinary, and with a very strong focus on the downstream effects of sexual harassment on women, women’s careers, professions, and societies. Likewise, by spending a little time on the blogs that were reporting the research in the years before 2017, you start to sense both the frustration and the anger experienced by people working in this space, but also the coherent and focussed nature of their work. Research published in the decade before 2015 is very different:  although we hesitate to make judgements, it feels like a more coolly academic area of work.

Figure 5 Mainstream media linking to research about ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘MeToo’ in Altmetric

Figure 6 Blogs linking to research about ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘MeToo’ in Altmetric

The altmetric data suggests that there is a shifting discourse and sense of rhetoric within this research community as it moves towards the formation of a unified community of people with shared interests; a proto-network of academics who are willing and able to address a real-world crisis with research. The publications output in Dimensions confirms this suspicion: we can see the growth in annual output of sexual harassment research up to 2017, and then the explosive growth in academic publications following the Weinstein scandal, rising from 500 publications a year to 5,000. Mendeley Readers suggests a similar growth in academic interest, presaging a substantial expansion in future citation rates and usage for this relatively small research community.

Figure 7 Publication growth for research in ’sexual harassment’ OR ‘MeToo’

Figure 8 Research grants in ’sexual harassment’ OR ‘MeToo’

The annual rate of publications and readership has multiplied tenfold. A similar rise can be seen in the growth of research funding in this area, with total funds rising from $1.8M in 2014 to $6.3M in 2019 – a number already exceeded by an unprecedented $6.9M of funding in 2020.

The different pieces of research data available to us using Altmetric and Dimensions can be woven together to create a fascinating narrative of a small and previously poorly funded research topic. The years leading up to the events of October 2017 are characterised by a relatively small group of researchers, growing steadily, but able to connect their research with issues in the wider world, and with their research able to find an audience in both mainstream media and the blogosphere. In the aftermath of Weinstein, that community finds a new audience in the general public, who are willing and able to engage with existing research. This, in turn, enables academics to create more research, getting more attention from the public, from other academics and, crucially, in research funding.

The post #MeToo and the Scientometrics of Sexual Harassment appeared first on Digital Science.

Tune into our latest thought leadership webinar, “Grand challenges for academic publishing: Defining Data & The New Scientometrics” on Wednesday 22 November at 3-4pm GMT (10-11am EDT). 

Publishers, intermediaries, technology providers, institutions, libraries and funders are all part of the scholarly communication industry. Each of these stakeholders have their own specific needs but do have one thing in common; a need to understand the research landscape in a way that informs strategic decisions. The nature of those decisions vary by organization type but might include title acquisition, editorial strategy, or investment in technology and infrastructure.

Traditionally, research has been classified by discipline and measured by citations, but that framework is changing. A fundamental shift has occurred over the last two decades with research increasingly being funded, published and organized around specific challenges and problems such as climate change, or Alzheimer’s Disease. At the same time, funders and governments are expanding the ways that they assess research to include direct economic and social impact, which in turn changes researcher incentives and needs.

The new framework for academia is more complex than the old and requires new approaches and tools in order to understand and quantify it. In this webinar, you will hear about some of the work being done in topic modelling, scientometrics, research classification and assessment.

Join our expert panel as they explore these issues, attendees will take away concrete examples of approaches they might take in order to more completely understand the needs and behaviours of their customers and stakeholders that in turn inform better and faster strategic decision making.

You will learn about:

• How the structure of academic research is changing and what that means for your business
• The cutting-edge techniques that are changing the way we classify research and build taxonomies
• How publishers, universities and governments are using new types of data to make strategic decisions
• Some simple ways that you can begin to harness scientometrics to help your business

Thought leaders speaking on the webinar:

Phill Jones, Director of Publishing Innovation, Digital Science

Phill has spent much of his career working on projects that use technology to accelerate scientific discovery. He joined us from portfolio company ReadCube, where he held the position of VP of Business Development. Prior to Digital Science, he was the Editorial Director at Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the first academic video journal. Phill is a member the SSP educational committee and the STM association early career publishers and future lab committees.

In a former life, Phill was a cross-disciplinary research scientist. He held a faculty position at Harvard Medical School, working in bio-physics and neuroscience, despite having originally started out as a plasma physicist at the UK atomic energy authority. He has also worked as a microscopy consultant and scientific advisor for a number of startups and small companies.

Phill lives in Edinburgh with his wife and two children. He holds a 2nd dan black belt in TaeKwon Do and occasionally enjoys a dram of single malt whisky, although not at the same time.

Helene Draux, Research Data Scientist

Before joining the Digital Science Consultancy team, Hélène worked both in Academia and the private sector as a computational social scientist. Her work included the development of Havfriluftsliv, a web-mapping participative platform to facilitate the participation of the public in Marine Spatial Planning in Denmark, and a web-mapping platform to facilitate discovery of places described in Trap, the Danish landscape encyclopedia.
Hélène obtained her PhD in social geography from the Cities Institute (London Metropolitan University). Her work was funded by SECOA, a EU 7th Framework project on the adaptation of coastal cities to sea-level rise, and her research focused on the inclusive participation of the general population in decisions about the future of open spaces in Portsmouth.
Hélène has worked on many consultancy projects. For the CWASU research institute, she worked on a project for the UK charity SOLACE, to map the evolution of abused women’s social network over a two-year period. For S+G, a landscape architect company, she built a survey that incorporated a 2-week period of smartphone location/transportation tracking of students and staff on the campus of DTU, Denmark.

Mike Taylor, Head of Metrics Development, Digital Science

Mike Taylor is Head of Metrics Development at Digital Science. He has spent many years working in Elsevier’s R&D group and in the Metrics and Analytics Team. Mike works with many community groups, including FORCE11, RDA and NISO, and is well known in the scholarly metrics community. Mike is studying for a PhD in alternative metrics at the University of Wolverhampton.

Host: Laura Wheeler, Digital Science

Laura Wheeler is the Head of Digital Communications for Digital Science and will host the webinar.

The post Digital Science Webinar: Grand Challenges for Academic Publishing: Defining Data & The New Scientometrics appeared first on Digital Science.