The Royal Society Publishing

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About the Royal Society

The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. Since the first issue of Philosophical Transactions in 1665, publishing has been at the heart of the society’s mission of promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity. Today, the Royal Society publishes eleven journals across the sciences, with two being fully open access.

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Adopting Altmetric

In 2015, the Royal Society Publishing began using Altmetric, opting for the publicly-displayed Altmetric Badges to showcase the attention its publications are receiving, and the Altmetric Explorer for internal analysis of the data.

Ciara Doyle is a Marketing Executive in the Royal Society’s publishing team, whose role encompasses the full marketing mix, including email campaigns, social media, blogs, and digital advertisements, targeted at authors and institutions. Ciara shares insights into how the Society’s marketing and editorial teams use Altmetric to track the influence of their publications.

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Part of the marketing toolkit

Altmetric saves the marketing team significant time by allowing them to quickly identify influential papers for promotion, without having to manually sift through publications.

“We always use the Altmetric Explorer for selecting articles to promote, as we know the papers are interesting and accessible because they’ve been picked up by the news,” Ciara notes. “There isn’t another tool that would work as well for this, and it’s really easy to use.”

Articles with high Altmetric scores are often featured on the Royal Society Publishing’s social media platforms and blog. Authors are invited to write about their work, providing insights and increasing engagement with their research.

This tool also aids the marketing team in curating content for the Royal Society’s public newsletter, which reaches a wide audience interested in science. Altmetric helps Ciara to choose articles that have gained significant online attention, making them suitable for a broader readership.

Additionally, Altmetric supports the team in collating their annual roundup of top articles. “At the end of each year, we run a campaign showcasing the top ten papers of the year, according to Altmetric. We do a countdown on X/Twitter and then I write them all into a blog post,” Ciara explains. This initiative is one of the organization’s top-performing campaigns, highlighting the value of promoting impactful research.

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An editorial resource

The Royal Society Publishing’s editorial team leverages Altmetric to track performance of their content and create collections of high-impact articles. “Editorial also use Altmetric as a way to find their most popular papers, outside of most cited and most downloaded,” Ciara adds. This approach allows the editorial team to showcase influential research to their authors and editorial board that might otherwise be overlooked.

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