Just who's been talking about your work?

Want to know who's been tweeting about your work, or what news articles are out there on that latest bit of research? Altmetric are now making that easier than ever. 

Article level metrics

Wiley are piloting an "article level metric score" with Altmetric for every one of their articles in the Wiley online library. These scores give a level for how much the article is shared online. I only recently noticed this development after seeing a Tweet from Matteo Cavalleri (@physicsteo) about these Altmetric ratings. A pretty cool idea.

Next to each article is a little Altmetric icon and a score for that article. In their FAQ section, they explain how it's all figured out in three easy steps:

1: Volume - Your score rises as more people mention it, which makes sense. But you only get 1 mention from each person per source, so you can't fake boost the score by tweeting the same thing over and over.

2: Sources - Different sources contribute different amounts. So a newspaper article is worth more than a blog post (even a fine one such as this), but then a blog is worth more than a mere tweet.

3: Authors - The score depends on who is saying it. So loud-mouths talking about every article under the sun are worth less than a specialist sharing with their specialist peers.

So with this new information at hand, I went to check out my latest paper.

Looking at this article recently published in Angewandte Chemie, it has a score of 28, which to me sounds pretty good. Clicking on the link then gives you a breakdown of what that all means. So for this particular paper there were three news articles and five Twitter mentions. The news stories were all new to me. Being an author of the work you think I might have known, but no. A break down of the tweets states that four were from the public and one from a scientist. I'm pretty sure all the tweets came from scientists so I'd love to know whose work Altmetric doesn't think is worthy of scientist status! 

The news articles were all based on the same press release from an Angewandte but one link was to a Chinese website. A (possibly bad) Google translate of the opening sentence gave, "Eye for an eye, but also treat the person in his body", which was definitely not in the original English press release!

But hey Altmetric, I also talked about the paper on my own blog recently, so that's another one to add to the list, maybe need to expand your search a little. (--Update-- This blog is now recognised! Nice one Altmetric, sorry for ever doubting you.)

Alternate versions

Interestingly, Angewandte also does a German version of the journal (technically this is the original and the other is an international version). Looking at the paper in the German edition tells another story. The score is up to 34!

There are four news outlets this time and one blog. No tweets for this one but one extra blog (still not mine). Two of the same news pieces from the international version were there and one of the new ones was from a German website (a faithful translation this time).

So Angewandte is actually artificially lowering their scores by having two versions. Maybe something for the Altmetric team to consider here; combining the mentions somehow. Or I could just do it for them and add up the scores, which gives me an impressive looking 28 + 34 = 62. That's how science works right?

Conference tweeting

At the recent International Symposium on Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry conference (ISMSC8) there was a distinct lack of interactions through social media.

Whilst coffee breaks and poster sessions were full of interesting chats and discussions, the internet was almost completely ignored by the attendees. The ISMSC website encouraged the use of the hashtag #ISMSC before the conference began. But in the book of abstracts and throughout the conference there was no mention at all of Twitter, I was disappointed.

There were a couple tweets in the build up before the conference, giving hope of a social (media) bunch of people.

On my way to #ismsc ! I will present the last development of the peptide synthesising molecular machine. See you there.
— Guillaume De Bo (@GuillaumeDebo) July 6, 2013

But during the conference I found myself a little lonely with only Ivan Aprahamian and Guillaume De Bo really contributing. Ivan summed up the twitter experience calling the crowd "technologically challenged".

300+ plus chemists at #ismsc and only ~10 tweets
— Ivan Aprahamian (@aprahamian) July 10, 2013

With sponsorship from Nature Chemistry and the National Science Foundation, both pretty big in Twitterland, you might have expected some input from them. But alas no, it was left to Chem Comm to join us at the end to publicise the poster prize they were sponsoring.

Big congratulations to Brandon Hirsch (Indiana) winner of @ChemCommun grand poster prize - he won a future front cover of ChemComm! #ISMSC
— ChemComm (@ChemCommun) July 11, 2013

Another chemistry conference, ISACS11 is taking place this week with around 50 tweets just from yesterday, although mostly dominated by one Chemistry World journalist. Whilst this is not a huge amount it is still much better than at ISMSC8. Derek Lowe is also present and so he's busy blogging through some of the talks.

But what is going on here? Is it just a generation difference and the young folks need to step up or are some conferences missing a trick? Get the discussions going over some coffee sure, but continue it and spread it further on the internet.