Impactstory does a lot behind the scenes to find relevant metadata for new products; unfortunately, however, we’re only as good here as the data we can find from publishers, Mendeley, and other sources. And sometimes this data’s wrong.

Consequently, one of our top-voted feature requests has been manual editing of titles and author lists, so folks can fix mistakes. We’re happy to announce that today we’re rolling this feature out: just log in to your profile, click the product you want to edit, and then click the “edit” button.

We’re working hard to make Impactstory a place that really represents our users, a place they can explain and show off their identity as scholars. We’ve still got a ways to go in making that vision a reality, but features like this, that you let you fine-tune the look of your profile, are a great start.

Our mantra here is to ship features quickly and optimize ’em later. And after spending a lot of frustrated time waiting for profiles to load (especially very large profiles), we decided it was officially “later” and set out to improve profile loading times last week.

We ended up moving a lot of the rendering code from Javascript to Python, where it’s both faster and more maintainable, and doing some caching. The result: profiles like Heather’s are now loading around five seconds faster; bigger profiles will see even larger improvements. The difference is especially pronounced when you switch back and forth between viewing the profile and zooming in to individual products: the return trip is now almost instant, which we’re really happy about.

There’s still a lot of room to improve loading times, especially on the first profile load, but we’re going to wait on this for now, at least until we get feedback requesting faster loads. That means we’ll be able to turn our attention to shipping new features…we’ve got some coming up next week we can’t wait to show y’all!

We love requests for new ImpactStory features.  The second-most requested feature at feedback.impactstory.org has been support for arXiv IDs.  So, starting today, you’ve got’em!

You can import your preprints by arXiv id — we’ll retrieve the title and author list, then look up all the metrics we can find.  Interestingly, arXiv is actively against sharing download stats, but maybe with enough encouragement from you they’ll update their policy?

Thanks for everyone who took the time to vote on the feature, and keep those requests coming!

As you’ve noticed, we’ve been focusing hard on new features for ImpactStory profiles.  Today we announce another step towards a great impact profile experience:  a new, simple approach to embedding ImpactStory data on your own website.

An “Embed” link at the top of your profile provides simple HTML code to include in your website.  Just add the line to any webpage and, poof!  Your whole profile is there, with all of your products and their impacts.  You can see it in action on Ross Mounce’s website.

We’ll be decommissioning old-style embedding badges in a month, on January 17th 2014, to streamline our efforts.  We know many of you have included these stand-alone badges on your journal, lab, and personal websites — we’ve loved seeing them there!  We hope you transition to our new embedding model, if it works for you.

We’re deeply committed to great embedding for ImpactStory profiles, because, well, it’s your profile. It should live where you want it to, and look how you want it to look. So we’re excited about continuing to improve the embedding experience. Let us know at feedback.impactstory.org what additional features would help you share your ImpactStory profile in all the ways you want to!

Our blog is part of our scholarly identity, for many of us.  We discuss papers we’ve read, ponder issues we’ve been thinking about, and sometimes release our own early results. Wouldn’t it be great if we could showcase these mini publications on our CV, ideally linked to their readership and discussions in the blogosphere.

Good news: now it’s easy!  Starting today, your blog gets it’s own section on your ImpactStory profile. When you import a blog, we automatically find your most-tweeted posts and pull them into your profile, linked to their tweets, bookmarks, and other metrics. You can curate this list by adding and removing individual posts to feature the ones you’re most proud of.

Even better, if your blog is hosted on WordPress.com you’ll see still more metrics — comments, subscribers, and even pageviews!

We’re excited about the way this rounds out the story you can tell about yourself on your product list, and we think you will be too.  Go give it a try (and if you haven’t done so yet, pull in your top tweets, hook up your figshare account, and add some videos!).

Update: Topsy has ended data access, meaning this feature is no longer available for Impactstory profiles. We’re looking into ways to restore it as soon as we can. If you’re interested in this feature, please vote for it in our Feedback forum.

Do you tweet about your research?  If so, you know meaningful scholarly contributions and conversations happen on Twitter.  In fact, citation guidelines now specify how to cite a tweet [MLA, APA] — a sure indication that tweets are gaining acceptance as mainstream scholarly products.  Which is great… but your twitter contributions don’t make it on to your traditional CV.

We have a solution!  Starting today you can easily highlight your best tweets in your ImpactStory profile!  This allows others to see the work you are most proud of, and makes it easy for you to drill into your impact metrics for your own curiosity:

To get started, just import your Twitter account into ImpactStory.  This will automatically pull in your 10 most popular tweets and their related metrics.  You can also add specific tweets by URL.

We’re excited about this new way to showcase our online scholarly identity, and we think you will be too… give us feedback with your ideas for the future!

Update: Topsy has ended data access, meaning this feature is no longer available for Impactstory profiles. We’re looking into ways to restore it as soon as we can. If you’re interested in this feature, please vote for it in our Feedback forum.

We’re making it easier and more fun to get all of your research into ImpactStory.

Do you have a lot of research at figshare?  Great, just point us to your figshare account!  Or maybe you’ve pulled in coding projects through your Github account.

Starting today, you can also add products from these hosts individually, like datasets you’ve co-authored, or repositories you’ve contributed to.

Just click on the GitHub, figshare, or SlideShare importer tiles and point us to an account, a list of individual products, or both:

      

Have fun pulling in all of your research products!

Do you have thoughts about other ways it could be easier to get your products into ImpactStory?  We want to hear them!  Suggest and vote at http://feedback.impactstory.org!

Update: We’ve made it even easier to import individual GitHub repositories alongside other individual products you want added to your profile. Check out the Knowledge Base to learn more.

We’re big fans of figshare at ImpactStory: it’s one of a growing number of great ways to get research data into the open, where others can build on it.

So we’re excited today to announce figshare account integration in ImpactStory! All you have to do is paste in a figshare account URL; then, in the background, we gather your figshare datasets and report their views, downloads, tweets, and more.

The best part is that you’ll see not just numbers, but your relative impacts compared to the rest of figshare. For instance, here’s a figshare product with 40 views, putting it in at least the 67th percentile compared to other figshare datasets that year.  Here’s an even better one: not only is it in the 97th percentile of views, it’s also been downloaded and tweeted.

If you’ve already got an ImpactStory profile, just click “import products” to add your figshare account (you can also still paste individual DOI’s in the “Dataset DOIs” importer). If you don’t have an ImpactStory account yet, now’s a great time to make one–you can be checking out your figshare impacts in less than five minutes.

figshare’s tagline encourages you to “get credit for all your research.” We think that’s a great idea, and we’re excited about making it easier with ImpactStory.

Head over to your profile on ImpactStory and have a look around — we’ve made some cool updates!

Today’s release includes a smoother sign-up flow for new users, an easy and graphical way to add products to your existing profile, support for more types of research products (Your twitter account!  Your blog on WordPress.com!), and a cleaner profile page.

Check it out, give us feedback, and stay tuned.  We’re super excited because this release is a major update behind the scenes (for our nerdy readers: a rewrite into angular.js) — the stage is set for awesome features in the days, weeks, and months ahead.