See how Kudos can impact citations of your publications
0 Comments
Almost 18 months ago, I wrote a post for this blog about Kudos,
then a pilot service to help researchers and their publishers increase
the reach and impact of publications. The pilot was a success, with
basic analysis indicating that downloads of full text were 19% higher
for publications explained and shared using the Kudos toolkit. The
service launched fully in April 2014, and to date has attracted over
35,000 researchers and 35 publisher partners – including Wiley, whose
own experimentation with Kudos in 2014 resulted in encouraging
indications of the effect that Kudos can have on reach and impact.
A number of developments have helped to improve the service since launch, for example, our integration with ORCID®,
which makes registration and claiming easier for authors that already
have ORCIDs. We’re also now piloting an institutional service, which
will give staff in roles such as research development planning and
communications insight into which research and researchers are
attracting attention, and which activities and channels are proving
effective.
The Kudos workflow for researchers involves 4 basic steps:
- Explaining: adding plain language descriptions of
what the work is about and why it is important. This makes it easier for
readers to quickly evaluate its relevance to their own work, and also
makes it more accessible to non-specialist readers, or readers of a
different native language. - Enriching: adding links to related resources that
support the work or set it in context. These bring the work to life (for
example, with links to multimedia, or ongoing studies) and demonstrate
the impact the research has already had. - Sharing: using the Kudos toolkit to generate
trackable links for sharing via email, social media, websites, blogs
etc. These enable us to show researchers the extent to which explaining,
enriching and sharing are increasing the reach and impact of their
work. - Measuring: Kudos’ dashboards and charts map the
activities above against a range of metrics including page views,
click-thrus, full text downloads, citation counts, and altmetric scores.
Towards the end of 2014, we announced an exciting partnership with Thomson Reuters which means ‘Times Cited’ counts from Web of Science®
are now included in our publication dashboards (see the right-hand
column in the example dashboard above) – these figures too are linked
back to richer datasets in Web of Science, which enable researchers to
review and link to the citing publications.
Citations continue to be a critical measure of the impact of a
researcher’s work, even while other kinds of measures grow up around
them, and the Web of Science is widely acknowledged as the authoritative
source. Like many, we’re fascinated to see the extent to which citation
counts relate to more immediate indications of impact, such as
downloads and altmetrics. We’re also interested in how this varies by
subject area, or geography, or career level, and whether there is
variation between different forms of explanation (e.g. short titles vs
lay summaries), or different channels for sharing (e.g. email vs social
media).
Another aspect we’re considering is publication age; much has been
written about citation half-life, and many researchers are using Kudos
to build new audiences for older publications – for example, by adding
explanatory text and resource links that demonstrate how the work has
influenced later developments. Ultimately, our goal is to compile data
over time that will help authors, and their institutions, publishers and
funders, understand which activities and channels correlate to better
metrics across the board and throughout the ‘impact lifecycle’.
It is this last step that I want to focus on here. One of the driving
principles of Kudos is that it is independent – cross-publisher,
cross-platform, cross-metric. For researchers, it is a unique one-stop
shop for checking lots of different performance measures across all your
publications, which saves time and enables more immediate analysis of
which types of communication have proven most effective. From the
outset, we have included Altmetric data,
with links through to the comprehensive datasets for each article on
Altmetric.com. We also track usage into and out of the Kudos site
(click-thrus from shared links, page views on Kudos, and click-thrus
from our article pages to the full text on the publisher website).
Several of our publisher partners provide us with usage data so that
authors can also see the figures for abstract views and full text
downloads on the publisher site.
More information about Wiley’s partnership with Kudos, and a video introduction, is available here.
See how Kudos can impact citations of your publications | Exchanges
No comments:
Post a Comment