Metrics are dead! Long live… metrics?

MyScienceOpen is your ScienceOpen

Last week, we unveiled MyScienceOpen, our new professional networking platform for researchers. MySciencOpen comes with a whole cadre of new features that combine the functionality of a range of existing social platforms, and bring them directly to you all in one place. You get access to all of this at the click of a button through our ORCID integration. Free, legal, and easy!

One of the main new features we’ve added is the ability for authors to upload non-specialist summaries to their articles. This is great for increasing the visibility and impact of your research at the point of discovery.

But how can you track this increased impact? Aha, well, we thought of that. Every user at ScienceOpen now has a whole suite of brand new metrics that track how their content is being re-used across ScienceOpen.

Quantifying your context

Everyone can see the tab for your content in context. These show how many total ‘nodes’ or connections your work forms in the context of the ScienceOpen platform. We show:

• Your total number of publications
• Your total number of different journals published in
• How many co-authors you’ve published with
• How many articles you’ve referenced
• How many articles in our database have cited you

Dynamic publication statistics

We’ve also added three brand new metrics for you all:

1. Views of author’s publications
2. Citations by other publications
3. Altmetric aggregate of author’s publications

Each of these are private to individual users, at the moment. You can display them either as running totals, or track the changes through time. No other platforms gives you all of this for free for your entire, integrated publication record.

For citations, these reflect only those which are drawn from our current database of 32 million records. As such, they won’t be as complete as Web of Science or Scopus (yet), but we’re giving them to you for free! If you want to see a more accurate picture of citations, get your colleagues who you know have cited you to integrate their publication records through ORCID. Every time a user updates their profile with ORCID, our database gets more complete so that we can provide more accurate citation metrics for you.

The future

The next step for these features is to ask what you want to see! What else do you want us to track? How would you like us to visualise them?

One thing we really want to add is a feature for you to download your statistics. They are yours after all, and you should be able to do with them what you want. We also want to make the ‘context’ visualisations fully interactive as discovery modules, just like on the rest of the platform.

Further reading

• Enhanced article impact with MyScienceOpen
• ScienceOpen is a resource for the community
• Promoting your articles to increase your digital identity and research impact
• Key features of ScienceOpen: Integrated, Moderated, and Inclusive
• MyScienceOpen: The only networking platform you will ever need
• Getting started at ScienceOpen
• ScienceOpen membership: The how, they what and the why
• Improve your literature review routine and get your daily dose of science with us