Page 133 - Academic and Research Book_WEB

Impactstory (impactstory.org)

Tracks and ranks all research outputs via data from citations, social media, data and code repositories
and other sources. Links to users’ ORCID profiles and is freely available to Twitter users.

Research Gate Score (explore.researchgate.net)

The academic social networking site, Research Gate, calculates a score based on peer evaluations of
users’ contributions. Contributions can include publications and data, among others. The RG score is
weighted by the RG score of whoever is evaluating one’s work.
Altmetrics have several uses for authors, institutions, publishers, librarians, and managers, to name
a few. Altmetrics can help researchers understand how their outputs are being shared and discussed
via social media and online, and may supplement the information gained from traditional indicators.
It allows the use of several personalized tools for increasing visibility in social media and interaction
with online academic communities based on research interests. Apart from giving information at the
article level, unlike citations that take time, Altmetrics can quickly provide response to a particular
research work in scholarly as well as other forums. Altmetrics also provides a holistic picture of the
response to one’s work including its relevance to societal needs as well as policy-planning tasks for
improving governance. Researchers can complement their search of literature by instantly visualizing
a paper’s online attention, also easily find out new scholarly articles in different disciplines.
Publishers can showcase research impact to authors and readers in a beautiful new way as well
as monitor, search, and measure all of the conversations about journal’s articles, as well as those
published by the competitors. For Librarians and Repository Managers these tools can easily add
value to the libraries and institutional repositories. Altmetrics can track article level metrics for the
institution’s research outputs, and present to faculty, staff, and students a richer picture of their online
research impact.

Limitations

Before making use of the Altmetric ‘scores’, one should keep in mind several observations. There
are many different Altmetric providers available and it can be hard to determine which are the most
relevant ones. Like any indicator, there’s a potential for manipulations of scores. Also, Altmetrics may
indicate popularity with the public, which need not necessarily indicate quality research, therefore it
may not find favour with many institutions. In many subjects or disciplines it may not be considered
important, however in many areas it may be very relevant, particularly in the case of Social Sciences
and Humanities.

Unique ID for Research Contributors/Authors

When searching online databases by an author’s particular name, generally, results may show more
than expected number of bibliographic records of papers of the author, including contributions by
different persons with similar names or somewhat similar names. Having a unique identifier for an
author or a contributor of a scholarly publication can easily remove this ambiguity. Presently, two
online systems are available to the researchers’ communities for obtaining a unique identity of an
author or a research contributor: Researcher ID and Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID),
available at ResearcherID.com and ORCID.org websites, respectively. Creating a UID also facilitates
creating online profiles as well as groups for discussion based on particular research interests.

122 | University Grants Commission