There are now three separate and partly overlapping views on (alt)metrics of Aalto University research outputs, published roughly during the last decade. Majority is from recent years, but few date back to early 2000.
The variety and incompleteness reflects the fact that, in this context, data is both dynamic and somewhat arbitrary due to a variety of reasons. So, everything presented here should be taken with a grain of salt. NISO Altmetrics Standards Project White Paper, open for comments still today, is the definitive source for those of you interested in this topic.
Altmetric
The first view is an application around articles, based on data from Altmetric with citations and metadata from Web of Science. For more info, see this recent posting.
ImpactStory
The second one is an ImpactStory profile that shows a sample of other research artefacts than articles: arXiv e-prints, Figshare datasets, GitHub repositories, SlideShare slides, and videos from Vimeo and YouTube. Except arXiv items, the gathering process was manual: I made a Google search of each one to our site, and checked every hit so that non-Aalto authors were excluded. Still, some misunderstandings are of course possible.
The arXiv ID’s are taken from the local Tenttu database which so far serves as the official source of Aalto publications, although the situation is a bit fuzzy due to ongoing changes in the local infrastructure.
Tenttu didn’t know of any PMID’s. There were several Google hits to reference lists but only three seemed to be by locals. However, I couldn’t be sure, so I left them out.
Here, particularly interesting are GitHub repos. To my knowledge, this is the first time software and code made under the hood of the University are laid out like this, as a collection. Note that this is by far not all code there is; many research teams use a local storage, or the cloud repository is somewhere else than at GitHub, notably at Bitbucket.
There are a few items that don’t have a title. I’ve understood that for some reason, there is no relevant data at the other end of the link, or the URL is rotten. Due to some issues with the profile at the moment, I have not managed to delete these bogus ones (also, the whole Webpage section is redundant). Remember, ImpactStory Profiles is still a new and evolving service.
Profiles are mainly for individual researchers. For them, the job is easy. Rather that giving a list of item ID’s like I did, they can automatically sync their accounts, say, with GitHub, and pull other items with their personal ORCID number.
Based on a Google search on site:aalto.fi, there are only two aaltoians (is there such a word?) with an ImpactStory profile: Aki Vehtari, and Enrico Glerean. Of course there can be others. They just don’t mention it anywhere on aalto.fi.
BTW, if you haven’t seen the Happy birthday charts Aki has made with Andrew Gelman, do take a look. The New York Times ran a story on it in its Science section in December last year.
Talking about altmetrics, Enrico shows a great deal of activity. For example, he has brought Altmetric badges on his web page.
PLOS
The third view is an interactive web visualization built on PLOS ALM data. The DOI sample is the same as in the first view but the metrics are newer, from today, 18th July. As a proof of concept really, I also added Altmetric badges at the end of each line. A caveat is that they emerge only after you refresh the page. I need to fix that some day.
For some more info on this PLOS view, see this posting.
EDIT 25 July
As of yesterday evening, the ImpactStory profile is working much better, thanks to their listening to my bug report, and fixing things.
Now the statistics is correct, showing how many live products/items there are, how many of these have some metrics whatsoever, and again, how many of these have gathered some new metrics this week. Note that all these are links.
What I also find a nicely done service, is the traditional email digest that accompanies the profile. By default, the owner of the profile – me, in this case – gets it once a week. Look how ImpactStory gives feedback, and encourages!
