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Altmetric – now available at UCL!

By Kirsty, on 2 September 2022

Guest post by Andrew Gray (Bibliometrics Support Officer)

What is it? 

Altmetrics are the concept of “alternative metrics” – measuring the impact of research beyond scholarly literature. It encompasses a wide range of activity in diverse sources  social media (eg twitter, blogs), news publications, and grey literature (eg policy documents). This can help to get a wider sense of the impact of papers that might otherwise be missed were we to focus just on traditional academic citations. 

The primary commercial database for these is Altmetric (https://altmetric.com) – UCL has just taken out a one-year subscription to this service. We hope it will be useful for anyone interested in public engagement or research impact, as well as individual researchers looking at the response to their own work. 

It is open to everyone at UCL by visiting https://www.altmetric.com/explorer/login and entering your UCL email address. It will then authenticate through the UCL single-sign-on system. 

How does it work? 

Altmetric tracks a range of individual sources looking for DOIs, links to papers, or free-text descriptions of articles. It then matches these to the underlying paper and produces an index of the mentions. Here we can see the range of responses to a climate-change study. 

You will also sometimes see this coloured “doughnut” on publisher or repository sites – clicking through will get you to this same page. 

The most interesting part of the service, however, is the dashboard. This aggregates the results from all individual papers, and we can then filter down by subject area, date, publication venue, etc., to produce a more specific analysis. It is also possible to search for keywords to see the change in activity around a specific topic – one like “artificial intelligence” tends to show a steady level of interest, while one like “gravitational waves” shows very dramatic spikes connected with major discoveries. 

What can we do with it? 

The dashboard has been integrated with UCL’s RPS service, so it has a dataset of UCL papers since 2013, each linked to the faculty/department of the authors. This means we can do the same types of analysis for just UCL papers – or just those from a specific department or a specific author. 

The search can also be tweaked to identify specific topics. Here we can see policy documents published in 2022 which cite a Bartlett paper. 

Policy documents are one of the key strengths of Altmetric – they can be used as evidence of wider impact, especially for the social sciences. While they are formal documents, and very distinct from more ephemeral news or social media mentions, they are not indexed in most citation databases and so this impact can often be hard to trace. 

Altmetric data can also be exported – any set of results can be exported so that we can do detailed offline analysis of sets of papers, or at the individual mentions that make up the score. This data includes identifiers such as DOIs and ISBNs, meaning it can be linked up to other datasets easily 

What next? 

We are very keen to get this tool in the hands of as many people at UCL as possible and find how it can be used most effectively. Please have a go and let us know what you think! 

UCL-specific training and guidance is currently under development, and will be published in September 2022. Until then, please feel free to get in touch with the team (bibliometrics@ucl.ac.uk) with queries or requests for assistance. We are happy to arrange training as well. 

The tool is currently provided with a static dataset drawn from RPS, covering papers published 1 January 2013 up to 12 August 2022. We are working with the providers to improve the integration so that it will include “live” data, refreshed from RPS every night; until then, we plan to make periodic updates so that publications are added on a rolling basis. 

 

 

 

New year, new library research skills

By Kirsty, on 12 January 2022

Did you intend to make new year resolutions but did not get round to it? Why not resolve to take some time this year to further develop your library research skills and ensure you are following best practices for research? UCL Library Services provides training and support to enable you to carry out your research effectively, including online guidance and self-paced tutorials, live online training sessions, tailored and individual training and specialist enquiry services.

Here are our top 5 suggested resolutions for researchers looking to enhance their library research skills and research practices:

Be FAIR

The principles of FAIR are designed to help lower barriers to research outputs and help other researchers find and understand them in order to reuse and repurpose them. This will in turn build further research opportunities and maximise the potential benefit of resources.

Findable – making research outputs discoverable by the wider academic community and the public.
Accessible – using unique identifiers, clear metadata, use of language and access protocols.
Interoperable – applying standards to encode and exchange data and metadata.
Reusable – enabling the repurposing of research outputs to maximise their research potential.

Practise open publishing

The goal of Open Access is to make all research material openly available online without restriction, to all readers, free from the barriers imposed by subscriptions. Open access is now required by many research funders and for the REF but it also has its own intrinsic benefits such as more exposure for your work, more citations, broader reach and wider readership worldwide.

Get searching

Refine your literature searching skills for reliable, relevant and comprehensive results. Whether you are searching for references to inform your research, as background reading, to scope your research topic, for a literature review or a systematic review, a robust search strategy is essential to ensure you find all the relevant research without having to wade through excessive irrelevant results. Our support for literature searching includes a range of options to support you at every stage of your research:

Organise your references

Get the most out of reference management software such as EndNote, Mendeley or Zotero, which enable you to gather and organise references and full text documents relevant to your research and to insert references in a Word document automatically, generating a reference list in the citation style of your choice. We provide support in using EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero to help you use the software more effectively and to troubleshoot your queries:

Understand bibliometrics

Bibliometrics is concerned with the analysis of research based on citation counts and patterns. The individual measures used are also commonly referred to as bibliometrics, or citation metrics.

 

Open Science monthly schedule outline – Academic year 21/22

By Kirsty, on 23 November 2021

New for the academic year 2021-22 the Office for Open Science and Scholarship is organising a monthly series of talks, showcases and training sessions across as many of the eight pillars as we can fit in for UCL colleagues and students at all levels.

All of the teams will be teaching their usual classes, keep watching your usual sources of training plus here and on Twitter for those, but these introductory sessions are intended to give a general overview of each subject area for a general audience with plenty of opportunities for discussion and questions. These introductory sessions will also be supplemented with ad hoc events throughout the year.

  • November
    Departmental UKRI Briefings – contact catherine.sharp@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a briefing for your team
  • December
    Introduction to the Office for Open Science & Scholarship – December 15th 2-3pm – Postponed, please express interest below
  • January 22
    Introduction to responsible metrics – January 27th 2-3pm – Online
  • February
    Introduction to Research Data Management – February 2nd 10-11am – Online
  • March
    Getting started with the RDR – Friday 4th Mar 10-11am – Online
  • April
    Open Science Conference (Dates TBC)
  • May
    Citizen Science project showcase (Details & Dates TBC)
  • June
    Citizen Science, Public Engagement & Research Impact (Dates TBC)
  • July
    ORCiD, DOI and beyond – Introduction to Persistent identifiers (Dates TBC)

If you are interested in any of the sessions above then please complete the MS form and the organisers will get back to you with calendar details and joining instructions for planned sessions. Any sessions without firm dates, we will contact you as soon as details are confirmed.

Wellcome Trust OA policy and DORA webinar – summary and links

By Kirsty, on 17 December 2020

On Wednesday 16th December the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship hosted a webinar focussing on the forthcoming Wellcome Trust Open Access policy, with particular reference to DORA, as well as how we are making progress towards fully being able to meet its terms.

Our first speaker was David Carr from the Wellcome trust who talked about the development of the Open Access focussed teams inside Wellcome Trust before outlining the new policy in full and describing in detail the elements which are distinct from the previous policy as shown in the image below.

David then moved on to describing the background to Wellcome’s commitment to responsible research evaluation, and the decision to include DORA in the new policy. He also described the feedback and redrafting process that it went through thanks to the feedback from the community.

Following on from David, we had a talk from Dr Ralitsa Madsen, who shared her experiences as a junior researcher around the issue of research evaluation and especially its relationship with transparency and Open Science.  She has worked with Chris Chambers of the UKRN to develop a policy template for funders to try and encourage more adoption, but also make it easier for them to adopt, by providing a ready-made solution!

We then turned to the Library Services contingent of the webinar speakers, starting out with Dr Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost for Library Services and the Office for Open Science and Scholarship. Paul walked us through the development of the UCL responsible metrics policy and the ways that it is being implemented in HR, recruitment and promotions processes.

Catherine Sharp, Head of Open Access Services followed up with a whistle-stop tour of the changes that have been made to the Open Access processes in order to support academic staff to meet the terms of the new policy, including numerous transformative arrangements with different publishers.

At the end of the webinar we had one remaining question which we put to David after the session:

What do ‘appropriate sanctions’ look like?

David’s response: There’s actually no change on this – the sanctions are actually already in place, and will remain as are when the new policy comes into effect in January.

Essentially we monitor compliance at end-of-grant reporting stage and when researchers apply for new funding.  If a researcher has non-compliant papers, then we will not activate new grants or funding renewals until any non-compliant Wellcome papers have been made open access.  Where papers reported in an end of grant report are not compliant, we will also not accept any new grant applications from that researcher until this has been resolved.  In extreme cases, we also have the option to suspend funding to a whole organisation.  See: https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/guidance/open-access-guidance/complying-with-our-open-access-policy

The recording is available below and also on MediaCentral.

The new Wellcome Trust OA policy and DORA: a UCL webinar

By Kirsty, on 18 November 2020

Here at the Office for Open Science and Scholarship we are pleased to announce another webinar!

This time we have David Carr from the Wellcome Trust leading this fascinating webinar based around their new Open Access policy which comes into force in January.

  • David Carr: New Wellcome Trust OA policy outline and overview of changes
  • Ralitsa Madsen: Proposal on DORA alignment across multiple funders
  • Dr Paul Ayris & Catherine Sharp: How we are implementing the new policy at UCL

Join us on Wednesday 16th December at 12 noon for a lunchtime webinar, and plenty of time to ask all of your questions!

Sign up on Eventbrite to get your link to join the session


Full event description:

In their new Open Access policy, which will come into force in January 2021, the Wellcome Trust has introduced a requirement that organisations receiving funding must commit to the core principles set out by DORA.

In this webinar we will be hearing from David Carr, the Programme Manager for Open Research at the Wellcome Trust, who will be outlining this policy and sharing his thoughts on these changes. Following that we will be hearing from Dr Ralitsa Madsen, Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCL Cancer Institute about her proposal to develop a protocol on DORA alignment that all research funders should follow. The final speakers of the session will be our own Dr Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice Provost for UCL Library Services and the Office for Open Science & Scholarship, and Catherine Sharp, Head of Open Access Services with an outline of how UCL is implementing both the DORA principles, and the Wellcome policy in general.

We will have plenty of time for discussion among our speakers and for them to answer your questions so please join us for an interesting session before the policy comes into force