PubMed Commons and Altmetrics

This has been split from an updated older post on Citation profiles for our NAR and Concise Guide papers  and this section will be updated soon

PubMed Commons
In addition to keeping an eye on citations per se we also folow up on some of the newer ways of increasing the findability and connectivity of our work in the ever more complex bibleometrics/Social Media ecosystem.  These efforts are modest (compared to what can be done) since we have our heads down for the Day Job but some of them have become necessary  house-keeping . These include grant linking,  the addion of  ORCHIDs  for team members (both of these as  EPMC functionality) and making sure papers are entered into our very own Edinburgh Research Explorer (actually highly ranked in Google for title searches).

Two other aspects may be of  interest (they can’t be detailed here but background is in the links). The first of these is the use of PubMed Commons. that has several utilities for us, including being able to “daisy chain” forward citaion pointers (but you wont see them in EPMC yet).  For example, amoung the 73 PubMed  citations for our 2009 NAR paper, 7 are 2015 and 2 from 2016. Thus, some recent authors are still citing our oldest paper (we see this across the series in fact  but, to be fair, some of them could be giving us the courtesy of multiple NAR cites although I have not checked). We therefore came up with the strategy of adding discrete pointers in PubMed Commons. As it happened, the last one (pictured below) was added most recently, even thought it is first in the chain by abstract date.

So, if  the scholars in question happen to check PubMed (n.b. but not  BJP authors, since the most recent NAR reference would have been added by the Editors anyway) we have now have a set of  comments to point the four older papers forward to the fifth 2016 paper (and should we be fortunate enough to get accepted for a future NAR Database issue, we would then add a new comment to the chain).  Consequent to the posting above, an unexpectedly prominent  ping appeared  below, on the 2nd of Feb, highlighted in yellow.

In a nutshell, “Featured comments” just happend to automatically select ours (but it seems like an actual human edited it)  which consequently featured on the PubMed front page, no less, giving us 24 hours of micro-fame!  As icing on the cake, the concomitant dailly auto-tweet of the heuristic chart-toppers, shown below, reached 4394 followers of the PMCom account (and was re-tweeted by us of course)

Altmetrics
Continuing on the metrics theme, in the panel below you can see Altmetrics scores for our same five NAR papers, plus the one Kudos entry.

These outlinks can be found under the right-most “External links” tab on any EPMC entry that has them. The Altmetrics Rosette and sub-scores give a general measure of interest asssociated with a paper (but dont forget this may not necessarily be completely positive)  broken down by category, as you can see for our 2016 NAR below;

Interesting aspects of Almetic scores include that they are faily immediate (i.e. accumulating within the first month or so)  and tend to move in the oposite direction to the slower accumulation of cites (i.e.they flatten off).  Here again, we alow ourselves a little warmth of feeling to see that the Altmetrics hueristics (while not incontravertable)  puts us close to the top-10% of comparable publications for both our GtoPdb NARs (i.e. we got the word out). The older papers, published during LBA (Life Before Altmetrics), clearly pick up lower scores. To conclude by putting it on the  record, we are most appreciative of colleagues and compatriots who explicitly draw positive attention to our work in both traditional and altenative ways.