Altmetric Badges: how to engage your authors (presentation slides and Q&A)

These downloadable presentation slides from the 'Altmetric Badges: how to engage your authors' webinar, hosted 15 September, provide an introduction to Altmetric badges and how they can provide publishers with a useful tool for demonstrating their commitment to helping authors achieve broader impacts.

Here are answers to the audience question that were not addressed during the live webinar:

Reporting

Q: So authors are allowed to share their Altmetrics report on their e.g. ORCID page or via other channels?

A: Yes! Badges are free to embed on an individual profile or publications page. Visit our web page to test it out!

The Altmetric Attention Score

Q: If possible, can you elaborate a little more on how the Attention Score is calculated? (It is my basic understanding that some sources are weighted more than others.)

Q: You said that altmetric scores are based on volume, sources and authors. what do you mean by it's based on the authors?

Q: What is a good score? Respectively

A: The Altmetric Attention Score is an automatically calculated, weighted count of all of the attention a research output has received that we've found online. It is based on 3 main factors:

• Volume: how often is the research being shared overall?
• Sources: Types of sources are weighted based on the expected ‘reach’. That’s why news sources count 8 points towards the score, while tweets account for less than 1 point total.
• Authors: If someone is tweeting about the same article repeatedly, we lower the contribution of their mentions toward the score.

You can find a more detailed description of how the score is calculated here.

The score is not meant to be an indicator of the quality of research. It best serves as an indicator of reach. Therefore, there really isn't a scale for what's a good score. My advice is to start with your goals for engagement? What are you trying to achieve in reach? What do you want to see happen [more, less] That would be your benchmark.

In the presentation, I showed badges with scores over 1000. However, here's an example of a lower attention score. Yet, it's been mentioned in 17 policy documents at 1 patent (so far).

Also, here's a blog post on the attention score and best practice uses.

Customer Service

Q: Great presentation thanks! Do you have any templates for sharing with authors to encourage use and engagement with Altmetrics data?

A: We don't have anything right now but hope to by the end of the year.

Shareable reports

Q: Would be great to have the link to further information on creating shareable reports.

Q: Do you have a link to the editing shareable reports webinar??

A: As referenced in my presentation, here is the link to view "Shareable reports: how to engage others in your organization with altmetrics " webinar.