Over 20 institutions now using Altmetric to help track and report research impact

Altmetric announce today that over 20 world-leading research institutions have now adopted the Altmetric for Institutions analytics platform to monitor and report on the engagement and attention surrounding their research outputs.

First launched in June 2014, the platform aggregates mentions of an institution’s output from a number of non-traditional sources including public policy documents, mainstream and social media, post-publication peer-review and online reference managers.

Juergen Wastl, Head of Research Information and lead for the Altmetric for Institutions implementation at the University of Cambridge, comments,

“The altmetrics data and reporting functionality provided by this platform enable us to track the influence of our work on public policy”, he continues, “this is incredibly useful insight into the real world application and value of our research outputs which we were previously unable to track.”

Representatives from the University of Manchester, ETH Zurich and the University of South Australia, who are also rolling out the platform to their faculty, agree.

Sue Mikilewicz, Director of Business Intelligence and Planning at the University of South Australia, adds,

“A key benefit of the Altmetric platform is that it allows us to monitor the impact of our research – this includes non-traditional outputs such as policy papers, reports and creative works. We can also use Altmetric to monitor the effectiveness of our open access policy and our institutional repository – making it a very useful cross-departmental tool that will help to inform university-wide strategies and investment”.

The platform is also providing valuable insight for non-academic research institutes. Jose De Buerba, Senior Publishing Officer and Head of Marketing at World Bank Group Publications at the World Bank Group, says that the Altmetric for Institutions tool will help them to:

“understand the broader development impact generated as a result of our own knowledge outputs, many of which are in the form of annual policy reports, books, journal articles and grey literature, whilst at the same time enabling us to track citations and mentions in public policy documents ”.

If you want to find out more about Altmetric for Institutions, check out their website, and you can also follow them on Twitter, they’re @altmetric, and like them on Facebook here.