Altmetrics & Academic Social Media: ImpactStory

What is ImpactStory?

• Web-based application that makes it easy to track the impact of a wide range of research artifacts
• Aggregates impact data from many sources, from Mendeley to Twitter and also includes Scopus and PubMed
• Output is displayed in a single, permalinked report
• ImpactStory is an open-source, web-based tool that helps researchers explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products--traditional ones like journal articles, but also alternative products like blog posts, datasets, and software.

Who is ImpactStory for?

• Researchers

• Research Groups

• Funders

• Repositories

• Everyone

How should it be used?

ImpactStory data can be:

• highlighted as indications of the minimum impact a research artifact has made on the community

• explored more deeply to see who is citing, bookmarking, and otherwise using your work

• run to collect usage information for mention in biosketches

• included as a link in CVs

• analyzed by downloading detailed metric information

Some of these issues relate to the early-development phase of ImpactStory, some reflect our early-understanding of altmetrics, and some are just common sense.

ImpactStory reports shouldn't be used:

• as indication of comprehensive impact

  ImpactStory is in early development. See limitations and take it all with a grain of salt.

• for serious comparison

  ImpactStory is currently better at collecting comprehensive metrics for some artifacts than others, in ways that are not clear in the report. Extreme care should be taken in comparisons. Numbers should be considered minimums.
  

Source: ImpactStory FAQ's

In early 2012, ImpactStory was given £17,000 through the Beyond Impact project from the Open Society Foundation.

As of May 2012, ImpactStory is funded through a $125k grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

ImpactStory FAQ's

"No one can read everything. We rely on filters to make sense of the scholarly literature, but the narrow, traditional filters are being swamped. However, the growth of new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem. We call for more tools and research based on altmetrics."

1. Click on "Create My Impact Profile"