We’re thrilled to announce that starting today, Impactstory will be buying a new data stream: Twitter, G+, and Facebook data from Altmetric.com.
Altmetric have spent years working on the thorny problem of connecting tweets with articles. It’s a tough one: papers may be referred to by a dozen different URLs, a DOI, an arXiv ID, and more. But Altmetric have gotten very good at it–at this point, we believe they’re the best in the world. The upshot? Impactstory’s Twitter coverage just got way better. If you’ve got a profile, check it out: there’s a good chance you’ll see new tweets we hadn’t found before.
Along with tweets, we’ll also be leveraging Altmetric’s infrastructure to find mentions in several brand new environments. Is your scholarship being discussed on Reddit, g+, or Facebook? Starting today, Impactstory will let you know.
This is a big win for our users–both because you’ll see cool new data, and because the Impactstory development team can focus hard on adding features where we add the most value. It’s also kind of a cool moment for the nascent industry growing around altmetrics…we’re all starting to mature, focus, and build around our unique advantages.
Last but not least, Jason and Heather are both happy to be working with Altmetric’s founder and CEO, Euan Adie. He gets the Web, he gets how it’s transforming scholarship, and he’s a legit class act and good guy. So here’s to Euan, here’s to more and better data, and here’s to a successful and productive partnership!
Great news! It’s good to see the landscape maturing and see services finding their niche in the ecosystem rather than all competing for the same slice of market. A “cool moment” indeed 🙂
This is good on one side (more metrics for some things), but bad on the other (less metrics on others)!
One of the nice things about Topsy for tweets was that you could get metrics on any URL. Altmetric.com has a whitelist of URLs they collect metrics for, so now I cannot get metrics on some of my articles that do not have DOIs, such as the following:
http://ess.iesalc.unesco.org.ve/index.php/ess/article/view/409
Agreed! We also regret losing twitter coverage on articles and other research products without DOIs. No good solution for that right now, but we know it matters.
Excellent news! Now to bring down the costs on being an AltMetric user 🙂 Well done team…this is a great step forward.
This is an interesting move. I am curious to hear whether the goal of the partnership is limited to expanding the coverage of raw data sources or also leveraging altmetric.com scoring/ranking system or future integration between the services.
Interesting. It’s true Topsy just wasn’t cutting it for tweet data, particularly for old tweets – so in that sense I’m glad the Twitter data will get better. But I’m slightly concerned now for the independence of ImpactStory. I kinda liked the idea of having many different *independent* altmetrics providers, each doing it a different way – I look forward to seeing how ImpactStory can continue to do things differently to Altmetric.com 🙂