Kudos Service

Kudos is a web-based service that helps CACM authors increase the visibility and impact of their articles. ACM makes the service available to CACM contact authors who want assistance with increasing usage of and citation to their articles.

ACM sends emails to contact authors of recently published CACM articles to actively introduce them to and provide instructions for accessing the Kudos service. CACM authors are contacted four-to-six weeks after an article is published to allow ACM to accumulate usage data on their article. Authors can invite co-authors to register for the service as well to help maximize article usage and impact. Use of the Kudos service is optional, though evidence suggests the tools provided by Kudos can directly increase article usage and citations. The service also allows authors to monitor the impact of their efforts to increase the visibility and impact of their work.

Kudos helps authors explain, add links to, and share their work in a way that helps bring it to the attention of peers, the media, and broader audiences both within and beyond their specialist communities. Kudos also enables authors to measure the effect of these activities.

Authors who register to use Kudos on the Kudos website are led through various steps that prompt them to explain their articles; add context and enrich them with links to resources such as images and data; and share information about their articles via social networks and email. The Kudos platform distributes the additional author-added content and links to aid discoverability of articles. Kudos also enables authors to track the effect of their actions against a wide range of metrics.

When an author claims an article through Kudos, the service automatically collates and presents to the author information about the article on a Kudos Publication Profile Page. The main Kudos Publication Performance Improvement tools can also be accessed from that page.

ACM pays Kudos for the service and makes it available for free to CACM authors. There is no charge to authors to use the service.

Authors using Kudos can add short titles, lay summaries, and impact statements, and link these to their articles. Authors retain copyright of this data under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and grant Kudos a license to distribute this to third parties (e.g. abstracting and indexing services, research subject repositories etc.) to increase the discoverability of a work. Authors can edit/remove this data from the Kudos site at any time.

Kudos provides several different types of article metrics:

• Share referrals show the number of visits to an author's Publication Page generated by the author's email and online media sharing activities;
• Kudos views show the total number of visits to a publication page on the Kudos site;
• Click throughs show the number of click throughs to the publisher site;
• Full text downloads (based on data provided and updated monthly by ACM) show the number of times an article has been downloaded/read online at the ACM/CACM sites;
• Altmetric score is a representation of the amount of interest your article has attracted across news outlets and social media sites (For additional information, see Kudos' Guide to Altmetric);
• Web of Science® Times Cited, a metric from Thomson Reuters Web of Science™, shows how many times an article has been cited, and provides a link to Web of Science™ to see a list of the citing articles.

Find additional information about the Kudos service in the Kudos User Guide and FAQ page.