Altmetrics are a group of alternative metrics that capture mentions made to scientific papers on social networks, news sites and blogs; policies and patents; Wikipedia, and other sources to assess the impact of publications on the social web. A study using journals and articles from the SciELO network in Latin America was carried out to qualify the web presence of Latin American research results and explore the potential of altmetrics. … Read More →
Discussing indicators in research funding: What role do altmetrics play? [Originally published in Europe of Knowledge blog in December/2017]
At any rate, altmetrics, or alternative metrics, are gaining momentum in higher education. This post is based on my master’s thesis that explores the usage of altmetrics with a focus on research funding. Altmetrics track down and count the mentions of scholarly outputs in social media, news sites, policy papers, and social bookmarking sites. Then altmetrics data providers aggregate the number of mentions. This allows an observation of how many times research has been viewed, discussed, followed, shared, and downloaded. … Read More →
Academic journals with a presence on Twitter are more widely disseminated and receive a higher number of citations [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in December/2017]
Previous research has shown that researchers’ active participation on Twitter can be a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs and improving the prospects of increased citations. But does the same hold true for the presence of academic journals on Twitter? José Luis Ortega examined the role of 350 scholarly journals, analysing how their articles were tweeted and cited. … Read More →
How do researchers and journalists in Brazil relate to each other?
Scientists admit that dealing with complex issues related to their research with journalists is not an easy task. However, long they realized that communicate their results in scientific journals is not enough. To obtain research grants, attract collaboration opportunities and for career advancement, it is necessary – and advisable – to communicate with the public through journalists. Read about the details of this relationship and what can be done to improve it. … Read More →
The search for scientific literature: how readers discover content
What are the sources most used by researchers and other professionals to search and access scholarly literature? A detailed study conducted by experts in publication and management of scientific journals, published in March 2016, aimed to answer this question. Through a survey with over 40,000 readers worldwide, the authors built a broad overview of users’ reading habits, comparing those with results from the last ten years. … Read More →
From the NY Times: Biologists went rogue and publish directly on the Internet
The ASAP Bio conference held in February at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, US, brought together biomedicine researchers to discuss new ways to communicate research results using preprints and post-publication peer review. Renowned scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners started to deposit their articles in open access preprint repositories before proceeding with the formal publication in journals. The topic received last week the attention of the New York Times. … Read More →
May excessive transparency damage Science?
The scholarly community promoted and encouraged research transparency to curb the lack of reproducibility and scientific misconduct. However, this openness also opens room for attacks and harassment of researchers, often motivated by simple discrepancy between the results and even threats of physical and psychological violence. Learn how to recognize and protect yourself from attacks of this nature. … Read More →
The SciELO in Perspective blog celebrates its second anniversary
This July, the blog SciELO in Perspective celebrates its second anniversary in communicating, analyzing and discussing innovations and advances in the field of information science, in increasing the visibility of the journals indexed by SciELO, and in sharing the developments of the SciELO Program which is guided by its priority action lines concerning the professionalization, internationalization and sustainability of the journals. … Read More →
Study analyzes the use of social networks in the assessment of scientific impact
The use of social networks in science communication has been increasing on a large scale, and specific platforms have been created for interaction and information sharing among researchers. A study by researchers at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland evaluated whether and how scientific impact can be measured by social media data analysis, and how this approach correlates to traditional metrics. … Read More →
Social networks and scientific journalism: a challenge to editors
In an interview to the Blog SciELO in Perspective, Jaime L. Benchimol discusses the use of social networks and scientific journalism as a challenge to publishers. He shares his experience and presents the history and challenges of História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, pointing out: “You have to equip yourself properly and, as important as gaining the support of funding agencies, is to convince the leaders of universities and institutions that scientific journals are indispensable and are costly and complex and cannot be made by improvisations and voluntarism of some selfless”. … Read More →
What can alternative metrics – or altmetrics – offer us?
The results and comments in four articles dedicated to altmetrics and published in an issue of EPI are analyzed. They show future possibilities and the real difficulties in the development of a new technique for the measurement of the impact of research based on social networks on the web. … Read More →
The SciELO in Perspective blog celebrates its first year
Social networks are an integral part of the scholarly communication process, acting as they do as sources of access to curated information, as a medium of dissemination and marketing, and as sources of the so called altmetrics that measure the visibility and influence of research on the Web. The adoption of social networks by the SciELO journals is a priority of the SciELO Program in its professionalization and internationalization action lines. In July 2014, the blog SciELO in Perspective celebrated it first successful year of operation, and is defining itself as the common blog platform for the SciELO journals. … Read More →
Researchers reading habits for scientific literature
These days, researchers are finding themselves exposed to an avalanche of scientific information which is making it a constant challenge to select what is actually relevant and follow recent developments in a particular field. Studies show that for the first time in 35 years, researchers may have reached a plateau in their capacity to read articles and other sources of scientific information. The concept of reading may even be redefined over the course of time. … Read More →
The SciELO in Perspective Blogs Space in 2014
2014 will be a decisive year for the development of the SciELO blog space. The priorities will be to strengthen the general blog on contemporary issues in scholarly communication, broaden the participation of the journals in the Humanities, and launch new thematic blogs. … Read More →
To blog or not to blog – what academics are doing
When we speak of scientific blogs, we think of them as a means by which importance is given to the dissemination of scientific activities to the public in general. But apparently this ideal of transferring scientific knowledge to the citizens via blogs is not occurring. Instead, the blogs are becoming internal discussion forums amongst colleagues interested in their own professional careers, in other words, blogs by scientists for scientists. … Read More →
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