For the official press announcement of this news, please visit this post. For Kudos Chief Product Officer's more detailed tour of the new feature, read on!

We are excited to have just launched the latest feature for our publisher partners, allowing them to gain new insights on how their authors are sharing and which share channels are most effective.

With over 275,000 researchers now using Kudos, we have an excellent data set which provides new insight regarding how researchers are sharing. We provide this data exclusively to our publisher partners, but I can share some insights from the aggregated headlines data here.

The following shows our new share channel comparator tool for a typical publisher:

This example shows that sharing a trackable link is significantly more popular than sharing to social media platforms, reinforcing our experience that Kudos users share to a variety of channels, both online and offline. Researchers share these links in a wide range of ways – by email or on a discussion list; in a presentation, poster or handout; on a website, blog or via social media. We enable them to label each trackable link that they generate to help them compare results at a more granular, and custom, level (for example, "was it the link in the science fair handout or the link in the patient leaflet that led more people to engage with my work?"). Despite sharing a link being the most popular share channel, Facebook is (in this case) the most effective share channel, generating seven times more click throughs than other channels.

Kudos has, since its inception, collected data on usage and effectiveness of key social media channels and made that available to publisher partners. Data for all Kudos users shows that Twitter continues to be the most popular of the mainstream social media channels, but Facebook generates almost eight times more click-throughs per share. Kudos has also recently introduced a new share labelling feature, so users can classify their many other online and offline sharing activities – this is Kudos’s largest sharing category, highlighting that events, blogs, listservs, email and a myriad of other ways of communicating research are widely utilised by researchers, all trackable and measurable via Kudos.

We designed the share channel comparator to give an ‘at a glance’ visualization of sharing usage and effectiveness by channel and this has prompted a hugely positive reception from publishers from launch day, enabling them to quickly view and react to their author communication and sharing behaviors and see how they’re changing, in real-time.

This new feature is now available as standard on the Kudos publisher dashboard. For further information on how to partner with Kudos to gain access to this new feature, please contact Colin Caveney, colin@growkudos.com, +44 1865 872527.