The report is based on data from 325 faculty at major research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia, about their use of altmetric measures such as altmetric badges, Altmetrics.com, Plum Analytics and social media measures. The study presents detailed data on the percentage of scholars who track useof or citiations of their works on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, OpenSyllabus, research aggregation platforms, Mendeley and many other venues.
Just a few of the 115-page report's many findings are that:
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Altmetric badege use was highest at institutions in the UK/Ireland where 16% of faculty sampled had used them.
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Australian faculty were much more likely than those from other countries to track the mention of or use of their publications on major research aggregation platforms; 20% of them did so.
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Faculty under age 30 were much more likely than older faculty to track mentions of their publications on blogs; 11% of them did so.
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70% of faculty in business/economics -- the highest percentage of scholars in any subject area -- track citations of their pubilcations in Google Scholar.
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36% of depatment chairmen and distinguished professors receive reports from their university institutional digital repositories about dowloads and views of their publications, a far higher percentage than for the overall sample.
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35% of scholars sampled with conservative political views tracked use of or citation of their publications on LinkedIn.