Product Overview of Impactstory
Impactstory is an open-source, web-based service designed to help researchers track, analyze, and share the online impact of their academic work. Here are the key features and functionalities of the platform:
Purpose and Scope
Impactstory aims to provide a comprehensive view of the impact of various research outputs, including articles, datasets, posters, slide decks, software products, and webpages. This service is tailored to support researchers in understanding how their work is being received and utilized across different platforms.
Key Features
- Profile Creation and Integration: Researchers can create profiles on Impactstory and import their publications from various sources such as Google Scholar, ORCID, Figshare, GitHub, and Slideshare. The platform also allows users to enter a PMID, digital object identifier (DOI), or URL to add their publications.
- Altmetrics Tracking: Impactstory tracks several altmetrics, including citations, saves, views, and discussions from sources like Scopus, Mendeley, PLOS, Twitter, and Figshare. This provides a holistic view of the online engagement with the researcher’s work.
- Geographical Distribution: The platform offers insights into the geographical distribution of the impact of the research, helping researchers understand the global reach of their work.
- Public Profiles: Researcher profiles can be viewed openly on the web, although the site does not support searching by author or publication title.
- Integration with ORCID: Impactstory seamlessly integrates with ORCID, allowing users to create an ORCID profile if they do not already have one. It also auto-imports publications from Scopus and other sources.
Additional Tools and Initiatives
- Get The Research: Impactstory has also developed a tool called “Get The Research,” aimed at making scholarly articles more accessible to the general public. This tool uses AI to explain difficult jargon, provides definitions from Wikipedia, and categorizes articles based on their type (e.g., systematic reviews, randomized controlled trials).
- Open Infrastructure: Impactstory is committed to building open infrastructure to support the Open Science movement. This includes projects such as enlarging the Unpaywall dataset, disambiguating author and institutional data, and assessing the openness of faculty publishing behaviors.
Access and Pricing
- Free Trial and Subscription: Impactstory offers a 30-day free trial, after which users need to subscribe for continued use. However, it is free with a Twitter account.
Privacy and Open Source
- Privacy Policy: Impactstory emphasizes that it does not engage in privacy-violating data mining and adheres to a strict privacy policy, which can be found on the Unpaywall website.
- Open Source: The Impactstory software is open source, promoting transparency and community involvement in its development.
In summary, Impactstory is a powerful tool for researchers to monitor and share the impact of their work, offering a range of features that enhance the visibility and accessibility of academic research.