This document summarizes preliminary findings from a prototype altmetrics dashboard created at Aalto University. It discusses Aalto University's upcoming CRIS system, which will contain metadata on research outputs and be powered by Elsevier Pure. It also describes the goal of creating a basic altmetrics dashboard to visualize and compare raw altmetric data for outputs in the CRIS. Finally, it reflects on the quality of altmetric data, challenges encountered in the prototype creation, and potential reasons for analyzing altmetrics from the perspective of a university CRIS.

1. CRIS and
altmetrics
Tuija Sonkkila, Aalto University LSS
2:am Amsterdam 8.10.2015

2. Preliminary
findings
from Aalto
University

3. Aalto University CRIS
• CRIS = Current Research Information System
• To be launched in 2016
• Elsevier Pure was chosen in EU-wide tender
• Big + was usability, tested in Aalto Usability Lab
• Will contain metadata on research output, projects and
activities. Organisation hierarchy, person data and projects
are syncronized from backend systems
• Validation workflow
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4. Goal for 2:am
”PlumX
Dashboards Light”

5. Only a prototype, meaning -
The application is standalone, no dynamic updates. May contain
bugs. Legacy data from 2010-2013. NULL data values replaced
by 0 for easier plotting.
Officially, Aalto University is not applying altmetrics
Yet, web impact hasn’t gone without notice. Especially Altmetric
2014 top 100 got attention. The two articles listed from Aalto
were visible also in this application from January 2015
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6. 8.10.2015
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7. How to get data out
of Pure?

8. Web Services (WS)
Reports

9. Case DOI
WS REST interface offers an endpoint to publications
The DOI field cannot be queried though, so would need to filter
it out from all (or current) research output
For this prototype, DOIs were gathered via a standard Pure
report Research output with DOI. Manual Excel download, and
then processing in R
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10. Case DOI (cont.)
Pure CRIS data model is changing
The now separate DOI field will be depreciated. DOI is becoming
part of the linking strategy to full-text files
DOI standard report is not available any longer
Where to store DOI in the future, is still unclear. Perhaps in a
general URL field
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11. Organization
WS REST interface offers an endpoint to organization
But - organization does not change overnight, no need for a
dynamic update. A standard Pure report is fine for this
Note that all person data is deliberately left out of this prototype
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12. Impactstory

13. Aalto University profile
Data not related to CRIS but wanted to include them here, too
Experimental profile is manually (and seldom) updated because
not a person. By no means comprehensive, and sometimes hard
to tell if some item really ”belongs” to University
Weekly changes logged since December 2014, and a Twitterbot

15. Some findings

16. Service level
Altmetric.com API has worked without a hitch
Impactstory JSON weekly statistics are sometimes missing, but
with a (friendly) freemium profile, cannot really complain
RStudio shinyapps.io free account is not enough. You’ll need at
least Basic, if you haven’t got your own local R Shiny server
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17. Technology
Basic R Shiny applications are not hard to do, but reactive
dependencies can be difficult to handle (or maybe it’s just me)
The number and maturity of htmlwidgets for R packages is
impressive
For a live Pure WS connection, Shiny apps would preferably
need to be run inside University domain
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18. Why?
At this stage, only for comparing & pivoting raw values. No real
analysis involved yet
From CRIS’ point of view, it could be interesting to see e.g. how
different research output types gather altmetrics, and if there
are differences between Schools
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19. On data quality
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20. Demo

21. Thank you!
https://gist.github.com/tts
https://blogs.aalto.fi/suoritin/tag/altmetrics/
@ttso
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