1. Practical Uses of Altmetrics at the University of Pittsburgh
Timothy Deliyannides
Director, Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing
University Library System
University of Pittsburgh
Practical Uses of Altmetrics, a Webinar presented by
Plum Analytics and Library Journal
February 11, 2015, 1:00PM EST
Thanks for asking me to share some of the ways that we‘re using altmetrics at the University of Pittsburgh. I’d like to show you some examples of how PlumX gives us a more complete picture of how research is being used and shared in ways that go beyond simple citation counts.

2. WHY ALTMETRICS?
But first, I want to say a few words about why we’ve invested in this.

3. Goals of the program Serve the Pitt community
Track impact of documents in the institutional repository
Custom researcher profiles for a small pilot group
Full rollout to all University researchers forthcoming
Serve our publishing clients
Embed PlumX Widget in all journals and repositories
Demonstrate impact of published articles and preprints
Help integrate altmetrics with Open publishing platforms
One of our primary goals is to help show impact for research produced by our own institution. We’ve started by providing analytics for all documents in our institutional repository. Working with Plum Analytics, we’ve also set up researcher profiles for a small pilot group, and we hope to roll this out to all researchers at Pitt soon.
A second goal we have is to serve our publishing clients. The University Library System has a well-established publishing program, and we publish about 40 scholarly peer-reviewed journals. We’re doing this to support Open Access to scholarly research. We really intend to be transformative and to support innovation and change wherever we can, so we’re delighted to have tools that can demonstrate impact that goes beyond traditional citation counts, and starts to show impact earlier in the research life cycle.

4. Why altmetrics? More comprehensive Covers impact of online behavior
Citations, usage, social media
Covers impact of online behavior
Because scholars increasingly work online
Measures impact of nontraditional scholarly formats
Measures impact immediately
Because citation counts take years to appear in literature
I just want to recap what we see as the special value of the alternative metrics that we have through PlumX.
First, we’re able to put together a composite picture of many different measures.
Second, we’re able to track and show evidence of online behavior for the first time.
Then, we can also show the impact of formats whose impact has seldom been measured in the past. Here, I’m talking about the content that we all have in our institutional repositories – what we sometimes call grey literature – which might technical reports, conference presentations, or white papers. I have found it very interesting to look at the metrics for electronic theses and dissertations in particular. We’ve haven’t really had a window into this before now.
Finally, altmetrics can show impact immediately as it happens – we don’t need to wait three to five years for citations to appear before we can start to demonstrate interest and uptake in the research.

5. Pitt and PlumX http://plu.mx/pitt
Pitt was Plum’s first customer (2012)
Integrated with:
Institutional Repository (d-scholarship.pitt.edu)
4 subject-based repositories
37 Open Access journals
So, on to how we’re using PlumX at Pitt.
We began with a small pilot for about 40 researchers, each of whom have a custom researcher profile giving a bird’s eye view of their total impact.
Plum Analytics began by tracking every document in our institutional repository.
A little later, they began tracking four of our subject based repositories, and the 37 Open Access journals that we publish.
I’ll show you a smattering of examples from each of these areas in a moment.

6. ALTMETRICS AND THE INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY
But lets start with how PlumX looks in the Institutional Repository.

7. Here’s an article by team of researchers at Pitt that was published in PloS. You’re looking at the record as it appears in our institutional repository. If you scroll down the abstract page, you’ll see where we’ve embedded the PlumX widget.

8. Each time this page is displayed, the widget is dynamically generated and shows current information from PlumX. You can see that this particular article is already highly cited by looking at the citation section in orange at the bottom of the PlumX display.
But you can also see many other metrics that show that the article is heavily used and downloaded. 81 Mendeley readers have bookmarked it, and people have tweeted about it and talked about on social media. For most of these metrics, you can drill down and see more detail. So, for instance, the author or any reader for that matter can actually read the text of all the tweets firsthand.

9. OPEN ACCESS and IMPACT: A Tale of Two ETDs
I’d like to show you some other examples from our IR. In the past, we’ve had only very scant information about the use of electronic theses and dissertations. I’m going to show you two doctoral dissertations in our Institutional Repository.

10. They’re both from the History Department, and they were both defended in the same year - 2010.
If you scroll down and look at the first dissertation, you will see that…

11. …access is restricted for a five year period
…access is restricted for a five year period. We allow authors to restrict access to ETDs for up to five years, and this author chose the longest restriction possible. If you take a look at the metrics for this ETD, you’ll see that it has been downloaded only 8 times in the last four and half years, and that there are no other signs of usage or impact.

12. Now here’s the second ETD, also from the History Dept, also from 2010
Now here’s the second ETD, also from the History Dept, also from But this ETD was released for immediate access worldwide, and sure enough,…

13. …when we look at the metrics for this ETD, we see that it was downloaded 1267 times and received some comment and notice in social media. We’ve seen this same story play out many times. Although we haven’t studied this systematically, I think that with the help of these metrics, we could build the case that Open Access leads to higher impact and potentially more future publishing opportunities for authors.

14. We now have over 6,300 ETDs, and through the PlumX interface, we can look at the impact of all of our ETDs in aggregate. Here’s a table view looking at all Pitt ETDs in our IR. I’ve got it sorted by USAGE here - the counts basically represent full-text downloads from the IR.
You can see that the most highly used ETD is a dissertation about a wireless battery charging system, defended in Because it’s nearly 11 year old now, it’s built up a lot of usage data, but those were early days for social media, so there’s not much evidence for social media impact.

15. If we take this same list and sort it by social media impact, we get a very different picture. Do you notice that the records that have high impact in social media are all pretty recent? If you look at the dates in the leftmost column, you can see that these are all titles defended in the last year or two.
I think it’s also interesting here that high social media impact also seems to correlate with a high number of downloads. All of this is new data that we simply wouldn’t have without PlumX.

16. IN THE POPULAR MEDIA: a new large-bodied oviraptorosaurian therapod
And now another example from our institutional repository. About a year ago, a team of paleontologists led by a researcher at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History, who is an adjunct professor at Pitt, published a report of their discovery of a new dinosaur, a bird-like large-bodied oviraptorosaurian therapod.

17. The paper was published in PLoS ONE, and here’s the record as it appears in our institutional repository.

18. The same day, National Geographic got a hold of the story and featured this discovery as the “Chicken from Hell”.

19. It was picked up by CNN the next day,…

20. …and also featured on NPR’s Morning Edition.

21. By looking at the PlumX widget in the institutional repository, we can see not only the scientific interest in this paper, but also the social impact of this discovery and how it captured the imagination of the general public. These are insights we would not have been able to quantify before altmetrics.

22. THE PLUMX RESEARCHER PROFILE
Switching gears, I want to show you what a researcher profile looks like in PlumX.

23. This is a way of looking at the total output of a single researcher
This is a way of looking at the total output of a single researcher. In this example for Peter Brusilovsky, a professor in Pitt’s iSchool, Plum is tracking 162 artifacts from Dr. Brusilovsky’s CV, most of which are in the IR. You can see a breakdown of the artifacts by type, including books and articles, but also conference papers, presentations, and technical reports. We also see graphic view of the total impact of all his works broken out by Plum’s five impact types.

24. Here, we’ve scrolled down in the profile to look at the actual data for each artifact in one large table. I’ve got it sorted by citation counts here, and you can see that Dr. Brusilovsky is a highly cited author, with one paper from 2001 cited 840 times. You can also see how these highly cited papers correlate with captures. Most the these ‘captures’ represent Mendeley bookmarks, so that’s another great measure of interest by serious scholars.

25. Here, I’ve re-sorted by publication date
Here, I’ve re-sorted by publication date. You can see that it’s too early in the research life cycle to start showing citations. None of the 2014 publications have been cited yet, but we DO begin to see other early signs of impact.

26. OK, now we’ve sorted again by social impact
OK, now we’ve sorted again by social impact. At the top, you see an article published in 2013 that hasn’t been cited yet, but has evoked huge interest in social media. This is something we want to find out more about – but would we even have known about it were it not for these alternative metrics?

27. ALTMETRICS AND SUBJECT-BASED REPOSITORIES
Very quickly, I want to show you how altmetrics play out in some our publishing platforms. In addition to the IR, we also host 5 other subject-based author self-archiving repositories.
These are not local digital collections, but rather, each one is built to serve an international community of scholars. We use Eprints software as the repository platform, and we have embedded the Plum Widget into four of these repositories.

28. Here’s an example from the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive
Here’s an example from the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive. This is a record for a Federal Task Force report, and if you scroll down,…

29. …you can see that this document has had a few citations, but lots of impact in the social media.

30. ALTMETRICS AND JOURNAL PUBLISHING
And lastly, we’ve incorporated PlumX into our journal publishing program. As I mentioned, we partner with scholarly societies and independent editorial teams around the world to publish scholarly peer-reviewed Open Access journals.
It’s very important to us and to our publishing partners to demonstrate the impact of these publications in every way that we can. Many of our journals are small niche publications with a small readership and many of them are quite new. We’re working very hard to build up their visibility and discoverability, but it takes time to achieve high citation rates. So we find it extremely beneficial to have a broader range of metrics to draw on.

31. Here’s an example from the journal Pennsylvania Libraries: Research and Practice . We use Open Journal Systems as the platform for our journal publishing program and we’ve imbedded the PlumX widget into all of our OJS journals – in fact, we wrote the plugin that can be used to add PlumX to any OJS journal.
In this example, if you scroll down to the bottom of the abstract page, you see…

32. …the PlumX widget at the bottom of the abstract page
…the PlumX widget at the bottom of the abstract page. This article is about how libraries can use Wikipedia to increase the discoverability of their digital collections – interesting stuff! It hasn’t been cited yet, but it has gotten some interest in social media.

33. One last example from our International Journal of Telerehabilitation…

34. …that also shows downloads, captures and some play in social media.

35. PlumX at Pitt: http://plu.mx/pitt
THANK YOU
Tim Deliyannides
@deliyannides
PlumX at Pitt:
So, I hope I’ve given you some ideas about the potential of this new kind of information we are seeing for the first time, and how altmetrics might be integrated into your service offerings and your work with researchers at your institution. Thank you.
Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing @OSCP_Pitt
URL for this presentation: