Altmetric adds Cassyni seminars to research scores

Altmetric has started tracking mentions of scholarly outputs in Cassyni research talks, adding seminars as a new source for Altmetric Attention Scores.

Papers discussed in Cassyni-hosted talks will now receive a seminar mention on their Altmetric badges. A seminar mention will carry the same weight as a policy document or clinical guideline.

Cassyni publishes research talks as structured outputs with Crossref DOIs and transcripts. Altmetric matches references in those talks to the papers they cite, allowing seminar discussion to feed into the attention score attached to the underlying research.

The arrangement also gives the recordings a metric of their own. Each Cassyni talk has its own DOI and will now carry an Altmetric Attention Score, shown through an Altmetric badge on the talk page that tracks where the talk is being discussed.

For customers using Altmetric Explorer, seminar activity will appear as an additional source in reports and timeline views. That brings talks into the same dataset used by universities, publishers, and other research organisations to monitor how scholarly work is discussed beyond formal citations.

Research signals

The companies argue that seminars offer a distinct form of attention because they capture discussion among researchers before citation data emerges. As institutions publish more of this material online, recorded talks linked to journal articles and departmental presentations have become a more visible part of scholarly communication.

Cassyni has positioned those recordings as citable research outputs rather than simple event media. By assigning DOIs and transcripts to talks, it has sought to make seminar discussions easier to discover, index, and connect to the papers they cover.

Altmetric is the second Digital Science product to index Cassyni data. Cassyni seminars are already available in Dimensions, where they appear under their own publication-type filter with metadata records and embedded recordings.

That broader integration points to a growing effort across research information services to capture a wider set of signals around academic work. Traditional citation counts remain central in research assessment, but publishers and analytics providers have increasingly added measures based on policy documents, news coverage, social media, and other sources of attention.

Seminars add a more specialist layer to that picture because they centre on expert discussion. Recorded presentations often include early debate around methods, interpretation, and relevance, and may link related papers in ways that are not visible through citation patterns alone.

Platform reach

Cassyni works with journals, societies, and university departments to publish research talks around newly released papers. Its customers include Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Royal Society Publishing, while its library includes talks from researchers and institutions across several disciplines and regions.

Altmetric, part of Digital Science, sells research attention data to universities, funders, publishers, governments, and companies. Its badges are widely used on journal and institutional pages to show where academic outputs are being discussed online and in policy- and practice-related sources.

Ben Kaube, Co-founder of Cassyni, set out the company's view of how talks should be treated in the scholarly record. "A talk is a research output, and it should be measurable the way an article is. That is why talks carry DOIs, are indexed in Dimensions, and are now measured by Altmetric," he said.

Digital Science said the addition reflects the role of seminars in shaping how research is received by peers. "A complete view of research influence means tracking the conversations that shape how research is understood. Seminars are where researchers present their new work to peers and get challenged on it, and adding that crucial discussion provides a much more complete perspective of the attention data," said Miguel Garcia, VP of Product, Digital Science.