1. Chief Librarian & Curator Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
5/11/2015
Altmetrics: Tips for finding meaningful patterns across a variety of data
Richard P. Hulser
Chief Librarian & Curator
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
University of Toronto iSchool Symposium
May 11, 2015
UT iSchool Symposium RPH

2. NHM Family of Museums: 100 years +
5/11/2015
NHM Family of Museums: 100 years +
Mission: To inspire wonder, discovery, and responsibility for our natural and cultural worlds.
UT iSchool Symposium RPH

3. World Famous Permanent Exhibit Areas
Age of Mammals
July 2010
Dinosaurs – June 2011
Nature Gardens
Nature Lab
June 2013
Becoming Los Angeles July 2013

4. Key Challenges
Increase visibility and understanding of primary research and value to institution
Demonstrate how primary research increases perception of institution’s value to trustees, donors and general public
Have measurements to back up statements and reasoning

5. Funders are noticing…
Grant funders looking for proof of “broader impacts”
often defined as “an effect, change, or benefit to the
economy, society, culture, public policies, health, the environment, etc.”
Research Excellence Framework,
Broaden dissemination to enhance scientific and technological understanding, for example, by presenting results of research and education projects in formats useful to students, scientists and engineers, members of Congress, teachers, and the general public.
As this gap has become wider, funders are now noticing that judging impact of research funded by them requires new tools, and the monitoring of new platforms.
Need more evidence about attention their work is receiving
Is funding going towards engaging work?
What other areas are getting traction within alternative metrics?
What are particular other funders getting traction with?
Can new avenues for funding be approached, or engaged with?

6. Traditional metrics lag behind…
Not only that, but impact factors and citation counts are very laggy.
Take several years to accrue
-Don’t tell the whole story
Provide only part of the impact profile of your research

7. Why do they matter? They help tell a story
What are #altmetrics?
Why do they matter? They help tell a story
Justify
Quantify
Identify
Demonstrate
Discover
Measure
Because there are certain kinds of things that require metrics where traditional metrics fall short

8. Tools Examined

9. Who/What is Altmetric?
Altmetric is a data science company that tracks attention to research outputs, delivering article output-level metrics via visually engaging, intuitive interfaces.
We track attention NOT impact! We cannot tell you if work is good or bad but rather we give you the fully auditable details so you can tell that story.

10. What Altmetric tool can do
Social media attention scan to research publications with DOIs or similar identifiers
Present results in graphic form: * geographic distribution * timeline of number of attentions * User type breakdown from social media profile
Enable ‘auditability’ – click link to mention

11. Attention Measure –> Donut
So what is the donut?
Overview designed to give a rapid, compelling impression of the type of coverage experienced by the various platforms.
Point out the three major contributors

12. The Altmetric Donut does not tell you…
Quality of the paper
Quality of the researchers
Whole story
The donut never tells you quality  It measure attention.
A high number or low number – as well as the colors around the donut – only make sense within a deeper dive into the data that altmetric provides
You need the whole story. Reliance on the number is not enough. Altmetrics are ultimately about context. Context is not just how many citations and IF (althought that’s important) but who’s reading, where are they reading, why are they reading, what conversations are they generating and how is that forwarding the science?
It’s only one piece of the conversation.

13. What Altmetric tool cannot do
Identify social media attention not citing research article with a DOI or similar identifier
Capture information easily from articles published without DOI

14. Altmetric for Institutions: NHMLAC Research
Richard P. Hulser

15. Who benefits from Altmetric for Institution’s data?
Librarians
Researchers
Communications
&
Public Relations
Research
administrators

16. NHMLAC R&C Attention Overview

17. Quickly See Items With Most Attention

18. NHMLAC R&C Journals article mentions

19. Navigate by authors, departments & journal subjects
If we navigate to Explore Your Institution we can then navigate the institutional data by Author, by Department, or by journal subject, which we enrich using the ERA data from Australia. If we select an author, or a department, we are sent to a new summary page like the institutional one we saw at the beginning. We can save these views as Workspaces – and set up alerts on a daily or weekly basis, which I will do in a moment,
Finally The custom groups tab also allows you to load collections of identifiers and create a collection of items which will immediately show any mentions that have been found for these items in the entire Altmetric dataset we have collected so far.

20. Library and Archives at NHM Digital Village
Richard P. Hulser

21. Thank you ! rhulser@nhm.org