Today I’m going to discuss 3 tools I consider useful, 1 which makes you the published authors look good and 2 which make me the information professional look good.

Altmetrics.com was created to take into account the buzz after a paper is published. It was designed to be complementary to citation counts which are typically zero for the first few weeks and months after publication and if they exist at all in the first year after pub are usually low. Meanwhile the paper may have gained media attention on tv, radio newspapers and magazines, been blogged about and otherwise made some impact.

Scimago is a journal comparison tool similar to Journal Citation Reports which Rasmuson Library used to pay thousands $ for. Scimago is based on 100% more data, is free and is really easy to use. It is particularly useful when thinking about which journals would be best for your submissions.

BASE is a great resource for accessing grey literature; theses, reports, posters and other mostly academic work that nowadays finds its way into IRs. Google Scholar will often find the same but BASE allows useful filters to refine large result sets.