Author: Jason

New Twitter account

We created total-impact’s “@totalpimpactdev” Twitter account a while ago, as a way to keep our small group of developers and early users enlooped about changes to the code. Since then, total-impact has matured past the point where only developers care.

So, we’re updating our Twitter handle accordingly: we’re now tweeting from @totalimpactorg. If you follow us already, no need to change anything. If you don’t, do! Our codebase and feature list are improving almost daily, and our Twitter feed is a great way to stay up to date.

What’s your pain?

We want to build a product users want.  No, actually, we want to build a product users *need*.  A product that solves pain, that solves problems.  Best way to know what the problems are?  Get out of the building and ask.

So, dear potential-future-users: where are you currently feeling real pain about tracking the impact of your research?  

Here are three potential places:

  • You are desperate to learn more about your impact for your own curiosity.
  • You put all of this time into your research, you really want your circle to know about it.  You need to share info about your impact.
  • You want to be rewarded for your impact when evaluated for hiring, promotion, grants, and awards.

What’s the rank order of these pains for you?  Are there others?  Tell us all about it so we can build the tool that you need: team@total-impact.org or @totalimpactdev.

load all your Google Scholar publications into total-impact

A lot of users have pointed out that it’s hard to get lists of articles into total-impact: you can cut and paste DOIs, but most people don’t have those on hand. Today we’re launching an awesome new feature to fix that: importing from Google Scholar “My Citations” profiles.

To use it, just visit your profile and click Actions->export, then “Export all my articles.” Save the file it gives you. Upload the file to total-impact in “Upload a BibTeX file” box when you create your collection (and of course, you can still add other research products from Slideshare, Github, Dryad, and elsewhere, too). In minutes, you can go from a narrow, old-fashioned impact snapshot to a rich, multi-dimensional image of your research’s diverse impacts.

Thanks to Google Scholar for making profiles easy to export, and CrossRef for their open API. This feature is still experimental (we only get articles with DOIs, for instance, so some are left out), and we’d love your feedback. Enjoy!

new metrics: number of student readers, citations by review articles, and more…

We’ve added some cool new metrics to total-impact:

  • number of citations by papers in PMC, 
  • number of citations by review papers in PMC, 
  • number of citations by editorials in PMC, 
  • the number of student readers in Mendeley (roughly, based on top-three reported job descriptions) 
  • the number of Mendeley readers from developing countries (again, roughly)
  • a “F1000 Yes” note if an article has been reviewed by F1000

See them in action in our sample collection.

These are exciting metrics for two reasons: they aren’t easily available elsewhere in this format, and we think they’ll be powerful signals about the impact flavor of research.

Thanks to PMC and Mendeley for making their data and filters available via an Open API: this sort of innovation isn’t otherwise possible.

If you have a current collection on total-impact and want to see these metrics, hit the “update” button.  New collections will all include these metrics.  Enjoy!

Megasprint!

As of yesterday, I (Jason) have joined Heather in Vancouver for what we’re calling the Megasprint: two months of 12hr-day, take-no-prisoners, hardcore hacking on total-impact. We’re working toward the mid-September release of our next version, codenamed Bruce (total-impact sounds like an action movie name…why fight it). 

Bruce will be our first heavily-publicized release (there will be t-shirts!), and will feature collection-level analysis and visualization tools, data from tons of new providers, and support for collections tracking hundreds of thousands of articles, datasets, software projects, and more. And of course the ability to knock Alan Rickman off a building.

We’re super excited about all we’ll be able to get done in the next, intense two months…stay tuned!

Tell the NIH that grant biosketches need impact info

The NIH wants to hear your thoughts on how it should modify its biosketch requirements. Feedback due Friday JUNE 29th 2012, midnight EDT.

The request for information is wide open, but specifically requests feedback on the idea that a researcher’s biosketch could “include a short explanation of their most important scientific contributions.”  

Sounds like a chance for scientists to tell their impact story!  Good idea? And do you think impact stories should include impact metrics?  If so, tell the NIH!

Right now the NIH biosketch instructions only include impact signalling through journal titles.  

Some ideas for new biosketch instructions:

  1. explicitly encourage all types of research output as publications, including software and datasets
  2. explicitly welcome indications of impact, like citations, downloads and bookmarking counts
  3. consider identifying articles only by authors, title, and ID/url rather than journal

Add your voice:  here’s the form.  We understand that the group receiving these responses is empowered to make changes.

(ht to Rebecca Rosen.  More info at ResearchRemix.  CC0.)

total-impact All The Time and IRL

Heather is going to be full-time total-impact starting August 1st!

For the last two years I have been a DataONE postdoc, with discretionary time for synergistic activities like total-impact.  I went officially 50/50 when the Sloan grant started May 1st…. and have now revised that plan to be 100% total-impact starting in six weeks.  

My passion for data remains. This move is because I believe research data needs better tracking tools to be fully appreciated and useful.  It needs context.  Context around how a dataset is collected, but also context around how the dataset is received by the community and what difference it has made.  As part of our commitment to diverse research products, total-impact collects metrics on dataset discussion and reuse and makes these tracks broadly available for mashups and remixes.  We’ll be doing much more of this in the coming months.

(I would talk about how great it has been to be a DataONE postdoc, but this isn’t a goodbye post — I still have papers to finish! 🙂 )

In related and similarly-awesome news, Jason is relocating to Vancouver for August and September, for total-impact All The Time and IRL 2012.  There will be t-shirts.


ti out and about

These are exciting days in total-impact land:

  • We’re participating (and speaking!) in StartUp Science this weekend. Check out the lineup: PeerJ! Mendeley! Academia.edu! ScienceExchange! total-Impact! OAMonday! and more. Ambitious innovative research tools are going to be game-changing for the way scientists work.
  • altmetrics12 is next week! Jason has been one of the main movers and shakers in pulling together a stellar attendee group: publishers, funders, tool-builders, researchers. Follow along at #altmetrics12.
  • we can barely sleep at night due to excitement about our new codebase… stay tuned or spy on our commits for teasers.


Welcome to Plum Analytics!

I (Jason) recently watched Andrea Michalek’s presentation describing Plum Analytics, and I’m excited to see yet another altmetrics tool being rolled out. I have to admit that it’s still a bit surreal to see Real Grown-Up People talking about altmetrics as a viable commercial product, after coining the word less than 24 months ago. But I think this modest idea is just one entry point into something much bigger: a growing awareness of the gap between our current, 1600’s-vintage scholcomm system, and the astonishing potential of web-native communication.

I quite liked the screenshots I saw. The tabular presentation of altmetrics data has a lot of potential, and I like it better than total-impact’s approach in many ways. I loved the identity-entry workflow, and liked the collection-level visualizations at the top of the page. I’m must less impressed with the wheel-style visualization; why the circle? Stuff’s harder to read, and harder compare without an obvious baseline. Lacking a clear visual metaphor as a justification, this feels a bit chartjunky to me. Of course, this is just their early prototype and will no doubt improve substantially.

Andrea did a great job with the questions, particularly in steering folks away from the “one number to rule them all” approach. The strength of altmetrics is not prefab reductionism: it’s presenting a diverse panel of metrics and empowering users (not providers) to mix and synthesize them.

Indeed, I reckon supporting these analytics control panels will be a very profitable business; they’ll soon be able to build off the metrics stream total-impact will expose for free. Although there is (in the short term) revenue to be had by simply collecting altmetrics, I’m wary of trusting this to for-profits; I think it is infrastructure that’s better handled by a free, open, trusted nonprofit. If we’re successful, it will be 🙂