Conclusion

This book gives an overview of altmetrics, their tools and how to implement them successfully to boost your research output

Supporting the Research Feedback Loop - Why and how library and information professionals should engage with altmetrics to support research

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the opportunities altmetrics offer to library and information professionals as part of their research support provision. This paper examines what altmetrics are and how they can offer another useful metric to help academics engage with a variety of interested parties over the web. Design/methodology/approach: The paper considers the emergence of altmetrics as a research measurement and scholarly communication tool and the impact on academic libraries. Identifies existing metrics and explores their shortcomings as well as how these can be bridged by altmetrics. Findings: Altmetrics offer a wealth of opportunities for library and information professionals to make better strategic decisions, explore their own institution’s research output and provide scholarly communications intelligence to their research community. Originality/value: The value in this paper lies in encouraging academic librarians and information professionals to explore altmetrics for themselves and align any new knowledge with existing services and skills, in particular around metrics and digital media

What Can Altmetric.com Tell Us About Policy Citations of Research? An Analysis of Altmetric.com Data for Research Articles from the University of Sheffield

Background: There is a growing interest in using and analyzing altmetric data for quantifying the impact of research, especially societal impact (Bornmann, 2014, Thelwall et al., 2016, Haunschild and Bornmann, 2017). This study therefore aimed to explore the usefulness of Altmetric.com data as a means of identifying and categorizing the policy impact of research articles from a single center (the University of Sheffield). Method: This study has only included published research articles from authors at the University of Sheffield and indexed in the Altmetric.com database. Altmetric data on policy impact was sourced from Altmetric.com following a data request and included citations up until February 2017. Supplementary Altmetric.com data, including news media, blogs, Mendeley saves, and Wikipedia citations, were also gathered. Results: Altmetric.com data did enable the identification of policy documents that cited relevant articles. In total, 1,463 pieces of published research from authors at the University of Sheffield were found to be cited by between 1 and 13 policy documents. 21 research articles (1%) were listed as being cited in five or more policy documents; 21 (1%) in four policy documents; 50 (3%) in three documents; 186 (13%) in two documents; and 1,185 (81%) in one document. Of those 1,463 outputs, 1,449 (99%) were journal articles, 13 were books, and 1 was a book chapter (less than 1%). The time lag from the publication of the research to its citation in policy documents ranged from 3 months to 31 years. Analysis of the 92 research articles cited in three or more policy documents indicated that the research topics with the greatest policy impact were medicine, dentistry, and health, followed by social science and pure science. The Altmetric.com data enabled an in-depth assessment of the 21 research articles cited in five or more policy documents. However, errors of attribution and designation were found in the Altmetric.com data. These findings might be generalizable to other institutions similar in organizational structure to The University of Sheffield. Conclusion: Within the limitations of the current text-mining system, Altmetric.com can offer important and highly accessible data on the policy impact of an organization’s published research articles, but caution must be exercised when seeking to use this data, especially in terms of providing evidence of policy impact

The missing link: the quality of UK local and national online media coverage of research

Local and national media have always played an instrumental role in the communication of academic research to the public. In recent years, this has proved even more important due to the extensive online national and international coverage of topics such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that the media represent the public’s first point of contact with, and key source of information about, science and research, then, as academics, we need to know, firstly, whether the media make this research easily identifiable for the public and, secondly, whether the research itself is accessible. Our study examined coverage of University of Sheffield published research in UK local and national media to explore how far it is identifiable and accessible; using data from Altmetric.com we investigated what proportion of research covered provided sufficient details to identify research, including links to the published articles and explored how much of the research was accessible via open access. A large proportion of research that featured in local media cited the journal, academic institution and author, but did not link to the article. By contrast, national media cited the author, institution or funder much less than local news websites, but often linked to the actual research article. Most articles featured were open access. The implications of this and potential reasons for the national and local differences are discussed

Profiling of Glycan Receptors for Minute Virus of Mice in Permissive Cell Lines Towards Understanding the Mechanism of Cell Recognition

The recognition of sialic acids by two strains of minute virus of mice (MVM), MVMp (prototype) and MVMi (immunosuppressive), is an essential requirement for successful infection. To understand the potential for recognition of different modifications of sialic acid by MVM, three types of capsids, virus-like particles, wild type empty (no DNA) capsids, and DNA packaged virions, were screened on a sialylated glycan microarray (SGM). Both viruses demonstrated a preference for binding to 9-O-methylated sialic acid derivatives, while MVMp showed additional binding to 9-O-acetylated and 9-O-lactoylated sialic acid derivatives, indicating recognition differences. The glycans recognized contained a type-2 Galβ1-4GlcNAc motif (Neu5Acα2-3Galβ1-4GlcNAc or 3′SIA-LN) and were biantennary complex-type N-glycans with the exception of one. To correlate the recognition of the 3′SIA-LN glycan motif as well as the biantennary structures to their natural expression in cell lines permissive for MVMp, MVMi, or both strains, the N- and O-glycans, and polar glycolipids present in three cell lines used for in vitro studies, A9 fibroblasts, EL4 T lymphocytes, and the SV40 transformed NB324K cells, were analyzed by MALDI-TOF/TOF mass spectrometry. The cells showed an abundance of the sialylated glycan motifs recognized by the viruses in the SGM and previous glycan microarrays supporting their role in cellular recognition by MVM. Significantly, the NB324K showed fucosylation at the non-reducing end of their biantennary glycans, suggesting that recognition of these cells is possibly mediated by the Lewis X motif as in 3′SIA-LeX identified in a previous glycan microarray screen