First Annual Altmetric Research Grant Awarded

Today, Altmetric announced the first awardee of their annual Research Grant, an award of up to £1,500 ($2100 USD) to fund research that facilitates the development and understanding of alternative research metrics (altmetrics) as part of the wider scholarly agenda.

The aim of the grant is to support projects that would not otherwise receive the necessary funding, and is open globally to academics, researchers and librarians interested in doing research in the altmetrics space.

It’s with pleasure the team have announced Dr. Lauren Cadwallader, Open Access Research Advisor in the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University Library as the first awardee.

Lauren’s proposal titled, “Papers, policy documents and patterns of attention: is it possible to identify which papers make it into policy by tracking their altmetric attention?”  was selected by an expert panel from among 29 high-quality applications submitted by researchers across the globe.

Euan Adie, Founder of Altmetric commented,

“The review panel was very impressed by many of the grant proposals received, but Dr Cadwallader’s stood out as a really interesting question that we could help answer”.

On receiving the grant Lauren added,

“Thanks to the Altmetric Research Grant I will now be able to dedicate a considerable amount of my time researching into a topic that will hopefully give us a better understanding of altmetrics as indicators of long term impact.”

Work is scheduled to begin on the project in the next few weeks. The results will be disseminated via blog posts and any data and subsequent publications made openly available.