Category Archives: New Resources

Introduction to Altmetric Explorer – Understanding Immediate Visibility of Publications

October 3, 2022

Featuring a spotlight on the extensive attention generated by open access publications. 

Altmetric Explorer is an online tool that monitors attention on the web beyond traditional citations for digitally available research publications. It captures mentions for all types of research outputs, including theses and dissertations, datasets, software and code, media files, etc. 

The training session will be led by Patty Smith of Altmetric. This hour-long session will introduce you to the platform and its features, and how individual researchers can use the platform to illustrate the reach of their work alongside traditional citation-based metrics. In celebration of Open Access Week 2022, we will highlight the wide reach of open access publications in addition to a general introduction. There will be plenty of time for questions. 

Related LibGuide: Alternative Metrics by Emily Nickerson

 

Altmetric Logo

What is Altmetric Explorer?

Altmetrics, in the broader sense, are a way to measure impact by capturing online mentions of research outputs such as papers and datasets. Altmetric Explorer, Plum Analytics and Impactstory are some popular altmetrics tools, and the Library has recently purchased a subscription to Altmetric Explorer.

Using Altmetric Explorer to improve visibility of your work?

Altmetric Explorer is an online tool that searches the web for “online attention” of research outputs. It captures the attention for all types of research outputs including theses and dissertations, datasets, software and code, media files, etc. Altmetric Explorer pulls data from:

  • Public policy documents
  • Mainstream media
  • Post-publication peer-review platforms (Pubpeer and Publons)
  • Wikipedia
  • Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc)
  • Multimedia platforms (YouTube, Stack Overflow, etc)
  • Patents
  • Open Syllabus Project
  • Blogs & Research Highlights (Faculty Opinions)
  • Online reference managers (Mendeley)

The overall attention accumulates into an algorithm that calculates the Altmetric Score and provides a visualization (the “Altmetric donut“).

Altmetric Explorer is a powerful tool that can provide contextual information when documenting the impact of your work in CVs, tenure & promotion dossiers, or grant and job applications. Not only does it provide insight into the attention your work receives, it also closes a gap where traditional metrics tend to be in the dark, by covering immediate attention.

The tool helps to answer questions about your output such as “Was my work covered by any news outlets?” – “Are other researchers commenting on my work?” – “Which countries are looking at my publications?” – “Was any of my scientific output cited in any policy documents or patents?” or “How does attention of my open access publications compare to those published in closed access?”.

As an additional feature, the Altmetric Score will be displayed for all content in our repository UVicSpace.

Learn more through our libguide

Attend one of our upcoming workshops!

Introducing Altmetric Explorer

February 28, 2022

Have you ever wondered what kind of attention your recently published paper got in the academic community, before the first citations occurred in other literature? Or what coverage it received outside academia without you noticing? You may not have missed a tweet, but what about media, blogs, or policy papers that mention your publication? In fact, you may be aware of some buzz around your latest publication on a hot topic – but could you ever present that in a serious way in your current research funding proposal? And can something like that even be captured in a structured way, or even measured?  

The answer is yes – look no further! We have just the tool for you!  

Starting in 2022, UVic Libraries is providing access to Altmetric Explorer, which serves exactly these purposes (and many more). 

Altmetric Logo

What is Altmetric Explorer?

Altmetrics, in the broader sense, are a way to measure impact by capturing online mentions of research outputs such as papers and datasets. Altmetric Explorer, Plum Analytics and Impactstory are some popular altmetrics tools, and the Library has recently purchased a subscription to Altmetric Explorer.

Using Altmetric Explorer to improve visibility of your work?

Altmetric Explorer is an online tool that searches the web for “online attention” of research outputs. It captures the attention for all types of research outputs including theses and dissertations, datasets, software and code, media files, etc. Altmetric Explorer pulls data from:

  • Public policy documents
  • Mainstream media
  • Post-publication peer-review platforms (Pubpeer and Publons)
  • Wikipedia
  • Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc)
  • Multimedia platforms (YouTube, Stack Overflow, etc)
  • Patents
  • Open Syllabus Project
  • Blogs & Research Highlights (Faculty Opinions)
  • Online reference managers (Mendeley)

The overall attention accumulates into an algorithm that calculates the Altmetric Score and provides a visualization (the “Altmetric donut“).

Altmetric Explorer is a powerful tool that can provide contextual information when documenting the impact of your work in CVs, tenure & promotion dossiers, or grant and job applications. Not only does it provide insight into the attention your work receives, it also closes a gap where traditional metrics tend to be in the dark, by covering immediate attention.

The tool helps to answer questions about your output such as “Was my work covered by any news outlets?” – “Are other researchers commenting on my work?” – “Which countries are looking at my publications?” – “Was any of my scientific output cited in any policy documents or patents?” or “How does attention of my open access publications compare to those published in closed access?”.

As an additional feature, the Altmetric Score will be displayed for all content in our repository UVicSpace.

Learn more through our libguide

Attend one of our upcoming workshops!

Featured thesis: Behind the green screen – critiquing the narratives of climate change documentaries

By Paige McKellar Strapp Bennett

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/12488

A Master of Arts thesis in the Department of Geography

Abstract:

As the climate crisis continues unabated, documentary films have become an increasingly popular medium through which to communicate its causes and impacts. Such films are an easily accessible form of mass media that has the potential to reach wide-ranging and large audiences, and often star popular celebrities. However, few academic studies have examined climate change documentaries and considered the ‘story’ of climate change that such films create. The lack of critical engagement with climate change documentaries is significant as it suggests the narratives of such films have been left largely unexamined despite their importance as a form of popular environmental communication. In this thesis, I use content analysis and narrative analysis to examine how 10 popular climate change documentaries tell the ‘story’ of climate change and produce specific ‘imaginative geographies’ about regions that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Though I note throughout my analysis that there are several moments of rupture in which counter-narratives emerge, the dominant discourse throughout these 10 films is one that generally reinforces Western science and technocratic modernity as the solution to climate change, and racialized ‘Others’ as its passive victims. Understanding how climate change documentaries construct their narratives and select their specific topics of focus provides important insight into how popular ‘imaginaries’ regarding the climate crisis have been produced.

To read more, visit UVicSpace

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Featured Thesis: Altering the cafeteria environment to improve health: a pragmatic observational trial of nudges and a marketing campaign to increase salad purchasing by first-year students

By Nicole Fetterly

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/12475

A Master of Science thesis in the School of Exercise Science, Physical and Health Education

Abstract:

Chronic diseases, including obesity are a global epidemic with significant long term mental and physical health complications, as well as societal costs from loss of productivity and health care expenditures. The causes of chronic disease and obesity are multifaceted and are linked to the complexity of eating behaviour, which develops over many years and is a product of our food environment as well as our social influences. First-year undergraduate students living in residence and on meal plans have lower vegetable intake than is recommended for optimal health and disease and obesity prevention. They also gain on average 2-3 kg in their first year due to factors like stress, increased autonomy in food choices and the food environment they face. With more than 2 million Canadian young adults attending post-secondary institutions and the importance of diet to overall health and wellness, building healthy eating habits and preventing weight gain during this life transition is an important public health priority. Nudges or choice architecture interventions aim to encourage public health goals without removing choice for participants. Nudging seems to have a stronger effect in deterring the choice of unhealthy foods over motivating the choice of healthy foods. Conversely, pricing strategies where healthy foods are subsidized appear effective. Many intervention studies have been conducted in cafeterias with young adults but there was a need for studies that compared the impact of nudge interventions against economic strategies on the purchase of vegetables. This study occurred in the main cafeteria serving undergraduate students on meal plans at the University of Victoria (n=1700). A longitudinal, quasi-experimental, single case ABACA research design was conducted and salad bar sales data was tracked. After a baseline period (A), an economic incentive was provided in the form of a loyalty card (B), this was then withdrawn for a second baseline period (A), followed by a cognitive and affect nudge implemented in the form of tent cards and sandwich boards with reasons to eat more vegetables conveyed with eye-catching, colourful graphics and messaging (C) and finally a third baseline measure (A) after withdrawal of the cognitive nudge. The results showed that small economic incentives and nudges were not enough to have an impact on salad bar sales and that they declined throughout the term with too much overlapping data to establish an intervention effect. Larger economic incentives, behaviour or placement nudges and a focus on deterring unhealthy foods may have had an effect but these intervention options were not deemed feasible by food service management in this context. It may also be that there need to be more extensive changes to an individual’s microsystem and that these need to be supported by other changes in the microsystem and further changes at the level of the meso, macrosystem or exosystem through university-level intervention in food service operations or government policy or regulation.

To read more, visit UVicSpace

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Featured thesis: Oh nisa’taro:ten? Learning how to sken:nen as a contemporary Haudenosaunee woman

by Emily Charmaine Coon

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/11529

Abstract:

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is threaded together with sken:nen, the radical practice of peacemaking. As a Kanien’keha:ka woman, I am responsible for finding ways of bringing our peace-full teachings, gifts and intellect into the future. This thesis braids together a resurgent ethic of sken:nen with Haudenosaunee knowledges, Indigenous feminisms and decolonial futurities by taking up the question: Oh nisa’taro:ten? (What is the contour of your clay?), posed in Kanien’keha to situate me in relation to the lands I come from. I am taking this ancestral question seriously by exploring the relationships that make up the ‘clay’ of my contemporary Haudenosaunee Indigeneity as it is shaped by life in an active settler colonial state. Tracing the rhythmic gestures of my grandmothers’ hands, I have created a patchworking star quilt methodology to gather fragments of my decolonial curiosities, weaving them into layered story-maps that capture constellations of my movements through settler occupied places. Through the assimilative policies of the Indian Act, quilting simultaneously became an act of survivance and resistance for my grandmothers; by picking up an intergenerational practice of patchworking as methodology, I am jumping into the ruptures of my contemporary Haundenosaunee identity, roles and responsibilities. Patchworking story-maps involves tracing genealogies of intergenerational trauma, rupturing geographies of lateral violence, overflowing either/or binary cuts of identity (non)belonging, and navigating the urbanized displacements of Indigenous peoples from lands, communities and relationships. In an effort to mobilize the knowledges and practices of sken:nen, and to ensure that my work is accessible to a wider audience, my story-maps have been shared in a digital format using Instagram to stitch moments of Indigenous presence, memory and language (back) into the fabric of cityscapes that are riddled with the logics of settler colonialism. This thesis aims to create generative spaces to explore, transform and (re)imagine futurities of peacemaking that move towards more accountable and inclusive webs of relationality rooted in fluid traditions and (star)world building.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/11529

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Astronomical Society and undergraduate research

January 2020

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series has published its first Compendium of Undergraduate Research in Astronomy and Space Physics. The papers will be published electronically as they are published throughout the year. They will also be open access!

2020 Compendium Table of Contents: http://www.aspbooks.org/a/volumes/table_of_contents/?book_id=602

 

Featured Thesis: Chinese Religious Life in Victoria, BC 1858-1930

This M.A. History thesis details the religious interactions between traditional Chinese culture and Victoria’s mainstream society in the early days of the city.

Chinese Religious Life in Victoria, BC 1858-1930

by Liang Han

Abstract:

Between 1858 and 1930, Victoria’s Chinese immigrants brought their homeland religions to the Canadian city of Victoria BC. They experienced a broad range of challenges as they attempted to fit into the mainstream society. This continual struggle affected their religious lives in particular as they sought to adjust in ways that helped them deal with racial discrimination. As a result, Chinese folk religions, especially those emphasizing ancestral worship, became intertwined with local Chinese associations as a way of strengthening the emotional connections between association members. Some associations broadened their membership by adding ancestral deities or worshiping the deity of sworn brotherhood in a bid to create broader connections among the Chinese men who dominated Victoria’s Chinese community. At the same time, Christians, who practiced the religion of Victoria’s mainstream society, reached out to the Chinese, at first by offering practical language training and later by establishing missions and churches that focused on the Chinese. Many Chinese immigrants welcomed English classes and the social opportunities that churches provided but resisted conversion, as the discrimination they faced in mainstream society had left them sceptical about Christianity, which was seen as closely linked to the dominant Western culture. However, Chinese attitudes towards Christianity became more favorable after the 1910s, when the patriotism of Chinese immigrants led them to support revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen and his new Chinese government, which promoted Christianity as a symbol of modernity. In general, the Chinese in Victoria were not especially enthusiastic about religion, whether Chinese folk religion or Christianity, although women were generally more interested in religion than men. Although many Chinese pragmatically sought comfort and assistance from both religions, they followed Confucian orthodoxy in focusing primarily on daily life rather than religious life. At the same time, over the decades between 1858 and 1930 both Chinese folk religion and Christianity affected the Chinese community as this community adopted a mixture of Western and Eastern cultures, including religious elements from both cultures.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/11071

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Featured Dissertation: Virtually invisible: at-risk boys and their concepts of self as beings-in-the-online-world

Dissertation of the Day*

UVic News recently announced that UVic ranks among the top performers in 10 fields, according to the 2019 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject.  To celebrate, we would like to feature some of the graduate research under each of these disciplines. Today, we feature a 2002 Education (Curriculum and Instruction) dissertation:

Virtually invisible: at-risk boys and their concepts of self as beings-in-the-online-world

by Jordan Tinney

Abstract:

As communications technologies flourish, increasing numbers of students are spending inordinate amounts of time in online communities. Often, students who spend excess time online are boys who are experiencing difficulty in school. For many of these boys, their participation in virtual worlds and their use of computers has shown them to be successful learners. However, for a variety of reasons, these boys continue to be disengaged in school and seriously at-risk for failure. This study explores the lives of at-risk boys who spend several hours a day in online worlds. The researcher is a long time participant in virtual worlds and through interviews examines the notions of self in online communities and how these at-risk boys navigate between their lives on and offline. The students’ participation in online forums may provide helpful insights into who they are and how we can best meet their needs in our schools. In addition to an examination of the social formation of self in online worlds, this study mounts a critique of the promotion of an Internet “culture” or “community”. In the text-based world of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), many of the foundations of what constitutes a culture may be absent and researchers may be too quick in accepting such forums as true communities.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca//handle/1828/10357

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team