FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
1. WHAT IS KUDOS?
Kudos is a web-based service that helps researchers and their institutions and funders increase the visibility and impact of their publications – such as research articles, books and book chapters.
2. WHO IS KUDOS FOR?
Kudos is for researchers who want assistance with increasing usage of and citation to their publications. Kudos is also for institutions and funders looking to increase the impact of the research that they fund, and for publishers wanting to develop closer relationships with their author communities and increase publication performance.
3. HOW DOES KUDOS WORK?
Researchers register to use Kudos and are then led through various steps that prompt them to explain their publications; add context and enrich them with links to resources such as images and data; and share information about their publications via social networks and email. The Kudos platform distributes the additional author-added content and links to aid discoverability of publications. Kudos also enables researchers to track the effect of their actions against a wide range of metrics. Institutional and publisher-based support tools are available.
4. HOW MUCH DOES KUDOS COST?
The basic Kudos service is free for researchers to use; publishers, funders and institutions pay a fee for access to support tools, information on publication performance and author sharing effectiveness within Kudos, and also to supplement the data set available to help authors evaluate the impact of their use of the Kudos tools.
5. WHY SHOULD I REGISTER?
With over one million research articles published every year, it's getting more difficult to get important publications the attention they deserve. Kudos helps authors explain, add links to and share their work in a way that helps bring it to the attention of their peers, the media, and broader audiences both within and beyond their specialist communities.
Kudos also enables authors, their institutions, funders and publishers to measure the effect of these activities for ongoing publication performance improvement. This will become increasingly important as authors are increasingly assessed based on the usage of and citations to individual publications (articles, book chapters etc.) as opposed to more general measures of performance such as journal impact factors.
6. ARE ALL OF MY PUBLICATIONS INCLUDED?
Kudos can be used for any publication for which a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) has been registered with CrossRef. DOIs are a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet. The publisher assigns a DOI when your article, book or book chapter is published and made available electronically. You don't need to know your DOIs to use Kudos, simply use the search box to type in your name and keywords from your publication titles to find, claim them, and start using the Kudos tools to improve their usage and citations.
7. CAN I INVITE MY CO-AUTHORS TO JOIN?
Yes, you can invite co-authors to register and claim publications that they have authored with you. They can also add links and share information about their publications through their networks. The impact of these activities will further increase your publication metrics, so you should encourage co-authors to also use the Kudos tools where possible, to help maximize your publication performance.
8. ARE FULL-TEXT ARTICLES INCLUDED ON KUDOS?
No – Kudos draws together key bibliographic information about your publication on each Kudos Publication Profile Page, but this is simply for the purposes of assisting you in using the tools to explain, enrich and share your work to increase its usage and impact. Each Kudos Publication Profile Page links directly to the authoritative version of your publication on the publisher's site, where the full-text can be downloaded directly, subject to the access rights of the reader and the licensing policies of the publisher.
9. WHAT HAPPENS TO THE DATA I ADD TO KUDOS?
Researchers using Kudos can add short titles, lay summaries and impact statements and link these to their publications. Authors retain copyright of this data under a CC-BY licence, and grant Kudos a licence to distribute this to third parties (e.g. abstracting and indexing services, research subject repositories etc.) to increase the discoverability of your work. Authors can edit/remove this data from the Kudos site at any time.
Researchers can also link related resources to their publications – such as videos, images, blog entries and presentations. These must be hosted and available on a third party site (e.g. YouTube, Wordpress, Flickr etc.). We may provide those links to third parties (e.g. the publisher of your work) in relation to your publications to further improve their discoverability and enhance readers' experience by exposing them to other material that helps gives context to your work. Authors can edit/remove these links from the Kudos site at any time.
10. WHAT METRICS DOES KUDOS MAKE AVAILABLE TO AUTHORS?
Kudos provides several different types of metrics for publications:
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Share referrals show the number of visits to your publication page that your sharing activities by email and online media have generated;
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Kudos views show the total number of visits to your publication page on the Kudos site;
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Click throughs show the number of click throughs to the publisher site;
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Publication views (where provided by participating publishers) show the number of times your publication's abstract has been clicked on/read online at the publisher's site;
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Full text downloads (where provided by participating publishers) show the number of times your publication has been downloaded/read online from the publisher's site;
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Altmetric score is a representation of the amount of interest your publication has attracted across news outlets and social media sites (see our Guide to Altmetric);
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Crossref citations contains the citation counts from Crossref.org. This means that in addition to seeing how many times your publication has been viewed on the Kudos site and on the publisher site, and in addition to seeing its Altmetric score, you can also see how many times it has been cited. Where available, you can also link through to Google Scholar to to see a list of the citing articles.
11. WHY DO I NOT HAVE 'SHARE AS PDF' AVAILABLE ON ALL MY PUBLICATIONS?
Shareable PDFs can currently only be generated for articles published by a subset of publishers partnering with Kudos. The list of participating publishers is growing quickly; please email us at: info@growkudos.com if you would like to know which publishers this is available for, or to suggest publishers that you'd particularly like included. Alternatively, please contact your publisher directly and ask them to consider participation in Kudos. You can read more about 'Share as PDF' here.
12. WHY IS THERE NO USAGE DATA AVAILABLE FOR MY PUBLICATION?
Usage data (abstract views and downloads from the publisher's site) is provided by participating publishers. We are constantly expanding the number of publishers providing this data to Kudos, and this information is then immediately added to Kudos. Please email us at: info@growkudos.com to suggest publishers that you'd particularly like included. Alternatively, please contact your publisher directly and ask them to consider participation in Kudos.
Kudos loads and tracks data from a number of different sources - most of the metrics on the Kudos Hub and Publication Metrics pages update within 24 hours, so please check back soon to see the impact of your explaining, enriching and sharing.
14. WHAT IS THE CITATION DATA WHICH APPEARS ON MY KUDOS HUB?
Your Kudos Hub contains the citation counts from Crossref.org. This means that in addition to seeing how many times your publication has been viewed on the Kudos site and on the publisher site, and in addition to seeing its Altmetric score, you can also see how many times it has been cited. Where available, you can also link through to Google Scholar to to see a list of the citing articles. Crossref.org citation figures are based on citations counted during indexing of the thousands of publications in Crossref but, of course, the dataset does not include every publication that might generate citations, so the citation counts you see in Kudos may differ to those you see in other services that calculate citations based on a different set of sources. Following the links to the records in Google Scholar will enable you to see additional information on the citations. The Kudos team continue to review other metrics that we might add to our dashboards to help make them as useful as possible to you. Please feel free to share your ideas with us.
15. WHAT IS ORCID AND WHY SHOULD I CONNECT MY ORCID ID TO MY KUDOS ACCOUNT?
ORCID provides identifying codes for authors of research works. Researchers can use the ORCID system to create a unique ID and associate their publications with it, and thereby ensure that they are not confused with similarly named authors of other works. The partnership between Kudos and ORCID saves you time: you can manage your list of publications in a single place ORCID, and progress more quickly in Kudos to the tools that help you increase research and impact. To find out more about the partnership between Kudos and ORCID and how to maximise the benefits for you please visit our ORCID FAQS.
16. WHAT MAKES KUDOS DIFFERENT TO RESEARCHGATE, ACADEMIA.EDU AND OTHER ACADEMIC NETWORKING SITES?
Kudos is not a networking site – we provide authors with tools to explain, enrich and share their publications to increase usage and impact. The Kudos Hub shows the direct results of this work on their publication-level metrics. We uniquely bring together publisher-generated data on publication performance with other metrics such as citations and altmetrics. Kudos is the only service that presents these metrics across multiple publishers and publications, and provides tools to improve them.
Although we collect basic data about an author for a 'profile' as part of our service, this is simply designed to give context to their publications as opposed to offering networking opportunities, or creating a CV of broader research experience and interests. Kudos fits well with academic networking sites – authors can choose to share information about their publications within them (and other social media channels) such as these – Kudos facilitates and reports on the impact of this.
17. WHAT MAKES KUDOS DIFFERENT TO IMPACT STORY, ALTMETRIC, PLUM ANALYTICS AND OTHER PUBLICATION-LEVEL METRIC PROVIDERS?
Kudos doesn't originate any of the metrics that we use to help researchers assess the performance of their publications and sharing activities. These are all provided by independent third parties such as publishers (usage data) and altmetric data providers (such as Altmetric.com). We only display these metrics to authors of publications when they claim them within Kudos, and/or to institutional/publisher subscribers. They are not publicly available. Kudos uses this data for the purpose of helping authors, publishers, funders and institutions assess which kinds of sharing activities are most effective for increasing the metrics that matter to them.
18. WILL KUDOS ACTUALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO MY PUBLICATIONS?
Evidence suggests the tools provided by Kudos can directly increase publication usage and citations. The Altmetrics Team at the Centre for HEalthy and Sustainable CitieS (CHESS), Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore (www.altmetrics.ntuchess.com) analyzed data from the first two years' usage of Kudos and determined that researchers' use of the Kudos toolkit leads to 23% higher growth in full-text downloads on the publisher site for those publications. Many other studies have shown that using social networks to share information about publications, and linking videos and data to articles can help increase citations, as does having a short title. Kudos will be tracking the effectiveness of all the tools we offer and will provide ongoing information to registered users on their overall effectiveness. In this way we aim to work with our users to help focus their time on those activities within Kudos that have most impact on increasing publication usage and citations.
19. IS THERE A SERVICE FOR INSTITUTIONS AND FUNDERS?
Kudos provides tools for universities, research organizations, corporations and funders through which they can support their research communities in growing their readership for their publications, and in turn maximize the impact of their research investment. Please contact us for further information at: info@growkudos.com.
20. HOW CAN PUBLISHERS PARTICIPATE?
Kudos offers publishers two levels of participation for an annual subscription fee. Basic participation comprises automatic claiming of publications for your authors through the Kudos service and provision of usage data to your authors, to enhance the information available to them in increasing the performance of their publications. Full participation further includes publisher branding within the system and access to a dashboard that gives publication and publisher-level intelligence on author sharing activities, benchmarking reports, and provision of a widget through which author-added metadata and links can be provided back to the publisher for a variety of uses to help further promote the author and their publications. Costs for both levels of participation depend on the size of the publisher. Please contact us at: info@growkudos.com for further information and a quotation.
21. IS AN API AVAILABLE?
Yes, an API is available to third parties (on request and subject to certain criteria) through which author-generated links and metadata can be made freely available for inclusion in discovery services and other sites that can help increase the impact of research publications.
22. WHEN I WANT TO SHARE BY EMAIL, WHY IS MY EMAIL TEXT NOT COPYING TO THE CLIPBOARD ON MY COMPUTER?
This functionality requires that you have flash installed on your computer. Many computers will already have Flash installed. If your computer does not, the free plugin available here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer. If you are using a tablet or smartphone, please select the text and copy it as you normally do for other applications.
There are two Kudos Widgets available to be used online on web pages, publisher platforms and online channels. The Kudos Publication Widget - one will allow you to represent your short title, lay summary and impact statement where present in the Kudos and the Kudos Resources Widget presents the resources you have added to the publication on Kudos. To view the instructions and how to add them to your page in HTML, see Kudos Widgets.
24. WHY HAVE I SEEN A JUMP IN MY PUBLICATION ALTMETRIC SCORE?
On Tuesday 16th December 2014, we made a change to how we handle scores with decimal places - as per Altmetric guidance, we now round up all scores with decimal places to the whole number - for example, 1.1 is rounded up to 2. This means that we will consistently show the same number as Altmetric donuts, whereas previously we rounded down rather than up - 1.1 would have be 1. Altmetric round up so if you are a small level of activity e.g. a score of 0.2 - this would round up to 1 rather than round down to 0.
25. HOW DO I UNCLAIM A PUBLICATION FROM MY PROFILE?
If you wish to remove a publication from your profile please access the publication page and click on the Unclaim Publication button on the right hand side of the page.
26. HOW CAN I CANCEL MY ACCOUNT?
If you would like to cancel your account with us, please email us at support@growkudos.com.
27. HOW CAN I OPT OUT OF NEWSLETTERS?
If you would like to manage your Kudos email subscription, you can do so by accessing Kudos Hub in the main menu and modify the Email Subscriptions box under the Settings tab.
28. WHAT HAPPENS IN THE EVENT OF AN AUTHOR'S DEATH?
In the event of an author's death, the Kudos profile is maintained as is. Further publications may be added to the account automatically based on uploads from the publisher(s). The email account with which the author was registered will continue to receive email notifications. Anyone with access to this account (e.g. the author's institution or next of kin) will be able to contact us (support@growkudos.com) and ask that email notifications are turned off and / or that the account is deleted. No indication that the author has died will be made on your Kudos profile page, which would continue to exist unless the institution or next of kin request that the account be deleted.
29. ARE YOU COMPLIANT WITH GDPR?
Kudos takes data privacy and security very seriously and we have robust processes and procedures in place to ensure that data remains secure. We can confirm we are GDPR compliant and have updated our Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, and Cookie Policy. If you would like us to delete your account, delete any personal data that we hold related to your account, help you change your email subscription settings or if have any other questions regarding GDPR or data privacy, please contact our Help Desk and we will be pleased to help you.
