Research Impact/Bibliometrics

There are a couple of free tools that authors can use to track and promote their research. The two most well-known are Impactstory and Kudos.

Impactstory is a free open-source tool that can be joined via your Twitter account. It can also pull in your publications automatically via your ORCID iD. Impactstory is a great way for individual researchers to promote, manage, and share their research online. Some even use Impactstory as an alternative to static online CVs.

Image source & copyright: Impactstory

Here are a couple useful websites relating to Impactstory:

Kudos allows individual authors to promote their research and track research impact metrics, such as citation counts and altmetrics, from a wide range of data sources, such as Web of Science and Altmetric. Authors can share information and resources about their publications.

Image source & copyright: Kudos

Here is a screenshot of an Author Dashboard on Kudos:

There are a number of altmetrics data service providers that publishers and institutions use to enhance the article-level metrics of their pages. In this section, the most popular providers are listed. You may find these providers' badges or scores listed on institutional or publisher websites. Altmetric, the most popular provider, has some free tools available that allow you to discover altmetrics for almost any research output.

Altmetric, also known as Altmetric.com, is sometimes confusingly associated with altmetrics in general. They are currently the only altmetrics company to track citations in public policy documents, and they offer free tools for use by researchers, institutions, and the public.

Image source & copyright: Altmetric

With Altmetric, you can easily discover altmetrics on almost any research output that has a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

K-State's open access publishing imprint, New Prairie Press, has badges implemented on its site. Here's an example of a badge on an article published in the journal The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication. 

The image and link (below) demonstrates what a badge looks like on an online journal article.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit Open Access (OA) publisher and advocacy organization. They provide article-level metrics (ALMs) for all of their articles. In the upper right-hand corner of an article's page, you can view the number of saves, page views, downloads, citations, and social media shares.

Image attribution and copyright: Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Image is a screenshot of a PLoS Pathogens article published in 2016.

To generate a detailed report of research impact metrics for one or multiple articles published by PLoS, you can visit PLOS Article-Level Metrics Reports page linked below. From there, you can find specific articles by including the DOI or uploading the file; or, if you are interested in finding articles in a specific subject or by certain authors, you can fill in the appropriate fields and then select "Search." Below is a link to a PLoS ALM Report for the article referenced in the above image and caption.

Plum Analytics, or PlumX, has the most data coverage out of all the altmetrics data service providers, but they currently have no free tools available for institutions or researchers, only subscription-based tools and products. However, you may find PlumX scores integrated on an institutional repository or a publisher's website.

Elsevier recently acquired PlumX, and since they also own Mendeley, it's expected that PlumX altmetrics will eventually be implemented on Mendeley regardless of subscription/institution access to these altmetrics services.

Image source and copyright: PlumX