Figshare to display Altmetric badges

Figshare, an online digital repository for academic research, has announced that research outputs deposited on its platform that have received attention online will display Altmetric badges.

The attention data for datasets, videos, images, code and other alternative research outputs will be presented within the Figshare platform, and users will be able to access a collated record of all of the comments, shares and discussion relating to an item with a single click.

The data for individual research outputs is gathered by Altmetric in real-time from thousands of non-traditional sources including public policy documents, mainstream news and social media, online reference managers, post-publication peer-review forums, and other online forums such as F1000 and Wikipedia.

Mark Hahnel, founder of Figshare said: 'There are currently more than 6,000 citations of research outputs deposited on Figshare, but citations are a notoriously slow indicator of impact. Altmetric data gives immediate feedback on attention from non-traditional sources.

'Not only will this significantly enrich the Figshare user experience and improve content discovery, but it will offer additional context and insight into the sharing and reuse of research outputs - advancing a new era of data level metrics.”

Both Figshare and Altmetric are part of the Digital Science stable, which also includes ReadCube, Overleaf and Symplectic.

Daniel Hook, managing director of Digital Science, said: 'This is a great example of how our portfolio companies are working together to maximise the benefits of their technologies for researchers. Encouraging further exploration of research metrics is central to everything Altmetric does, and this collaboration with Figshare surfaces the online engagement and discussion surrounding alternative outputs on a scale we’ve not seen before.

'Digital Science is continually working to ensure our tools are interoperable with widely-adopted platforms and tools.'