A new paper is kicking up a storm in the world of altmetrics (a community that seeks to incorporate social coverage in the assessment of scholarly impact). Analysing the relationship between social metrics and more traditional measures, the study by Gunther Eysenbach in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) concludes that highly tweeted papers are more likely to become highly cited.

Not surprisingly, the article, “Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact,” has been tweeted 575 times, and if Eysenbach’s findings prove true, should receive a fair number of citations.

more…

PLoS and Mendeley recently closed their Binary Battle contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and/or Mendeley’s APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are some big names on the judging panel, such as Tim O’Reilly (coined the term ‘Web 2.0’), James Powell (CTO of Thomson Reuters) and Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com).  The entries have been whittled down to 11 finalists and the winner will be announced on 30th November 2011. Read on for details of some of these finalists or go here a full list: http://dev.mendeley.com/api-binary-battle more…

Tim Berners-Lee created the Web as a scholarly communication tool but some argue that the Web has revolutionised everything but scholarly communication. One of the major adherents of this view is Jason Priem, co-founder of the altmetrics project, whose website states:

In the 17th century, scholar-publishers created the first scientific journals, revolutionising the communication and practice of scholarship. Today, we’re at the beginning of a second revolution, as academia slowly awakens to the transformative potential of the Web.

In growing numbers, scholars are moving their daily work to the Internet. Online reference managers, such as Zotero and Mendeley, have grown in popularity, the latter claiming to store over 120 million articles (substantially more than PubMed). As many as a third of scholars are on Twitter and a growing number cultivate scholarly blogs. more…

A key feature of the new manuscript submission system being used by the BMJ Journals is its connected functionality with other Thomson Reuters products, namely Web of Science and EndNote. Through Optima, authors can create their manuscript in EndNote and seamlessly submit it for review using ScholarOne. Its integration with Web of Science also means that reviewers and editors have one-click access from the manuscripts to the times cited, related records, and links to the full record files, allowing for a well-organised and proficient reviewing process.

Authors can upload their manuscripts from EndNote directly onto the submission system

more…

There has been a movement in the STM community to offer relevant metrics at article-level to help users determine the value and quality of research. This data provides additional context to a paper and consequently the BMJ journals have implemented online usage statistics in addition to the recent introduction of links to third-party citation measuring services. more…

Over the past few weeks, a number of new website features have gone live across the BMJ journal platform. Read below for more details on Scopus citation links, email alerts for specific subspecialities and TOC section RSS feeds. more…

Recently crowned winner of the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 Awards in the education, recruitment and jobs category, Mendeley, a research collaboration tool, has enjoyed a good deal of coverage in the press. It’s often referred to as “a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science” and  Dr Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, was even reported to have said that if they got it right, they could change the face of science. more…

With users increasingly viewing articles as ‘portals to greater information’, BMJ Group has introduced a new collaboration with ISI Web of Science, the multidisciplinary bibliographic database tool. All of our journal articles now include the exact number of citations for each article being viewed, as well as a direct link to the list of citing articles on ISI Web of Science. Have a look at the screenshot below, which displays the exact location of these ‘Citing article via Web of Science’ links at article-level. more…