I’ve recently been looking around to work out how to tell what impact my research has. Altmetric and Total-Impact think that they have the answer. Both services aim to quantify the extend to which piece of scholarly work has been “noticed” in the blogosphere.
Altmetric looks to be a little more of a commercial offering and has a similar feel to musicmetric that we mentioned in an earlier post. Created by Euan Adie of Digital Science to contextualise research work, Adie won Elsevier’s competition for using the SciVerse API while putting Altmetric together.
Total Impact is the result of a brainstorming session at Cameron Neylon‘s Beyond the Impact workshop in London last year. One of the leading lights behind the development, Jason Priem, made the news recently explaining the reason for the project.
Both data sets are growing with time and are likely to hook into more sources. Both have data APIs:
Surely…a challenge to play with data as rich and complex as this!