Altmetrics

Measuring use of open source software isn’t always straightforward. The problem is especially acute for software targeted largely at academia, where usage is not measured just by software downloads, but also by citations. Citations are a well-known pain point because the citation graph is privately held by iron doors (e.g., Scopus, Google Scholar). New ventures aim to open up citation data, but of course it’s an immense amount of work, and so does not come quickly. ...

The Lagotto application is a Rails app that collects and serves up via RESTful API article level metrics data for research objects. So far, this application has only been applied to scholarly articles, but will see action on datasets soon. Martin Fenner has lead the development of Lagotto. He recently set up a discussion site if you want to chat about it. The application has a nice GUI interface, and a quite nice RESTful API. ...

The Lagotto application is a Rails app that collects and serves up via RESTful API article level metrics data for research objects. So far, this application has only been applied to scholarly articles, but will see action on datasets soon. Martin Fenner has lead the development of Lagotto. He recently set up a discussion site if you want to chat about it. The application has a nice GUI interface, and a quite nice RESTful API. ...

So I want to mine some #altmetrics data for some research I’m thinking about doing. The steps would be: Get journal titles for ecology and evolution journals. Get DOI’s for all papers in all the above journal titles. Get altmetrics data on each DOI. Do some fancy analyses. Make som pretty figs. Write up results. It’s early days, so jus working on the first step. However, getting a list of journals in ecology and evolution is frustratingly hard. This turns out to not be that easy if you are (1) trying to avoid Thomson Reuters, and (2) want a machine interface way to do it (read: API). ...