#altmetric

[strathoa]

Twitter turbulences and their impact on Altmetric scores: a follow-up

Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian at U Strathclyde

As stated in the previous post on this topic a month and a half ago, we continue to look into this issue of the possible impact of the "twitter instability" on Altmetric scores as a proxy for social impact of research.

The bad news first: the Altmetric score for the March 2023 paper in the European Journal of Human Genetics that the previous post was looking into has barely climbed despite all the media attention. As of May 6th, 2023 the score for this paper is "just" 124. This is of course one order of magnitude higher than it was a month and a half ago, but it's still rather low (see the good news bit below). The silver lining is that all the references in the news seem to have been incorporated to the score – there's 14 of them recorded in the Altmetric page.

The good news is that some publications are still able to grow very high Altmetric scores quite quickly. See for instance this PLoS Genetics paper "Imputed genomes and haplotype-based analyses of the Picts of early medieval Scotland reveal fine-scale relatedness between Iron Age, early medieval and the modern people of the UK" by A Morez (Liverpool John Moores University) et al at.

This paper, also on the topic of paleogenetics/ancient DNA and also with a key input from the University of Aberdeen (by Linus Girdland-Flink and his team), was only published on Apr 27th, 2023, i.e. just over a week ago. Its Altmetric score as of May 6th is 1,363, resulting from 166 identified mentions in news outlets and 152 tweeters. This means first and foremost that Altmetric scores seem to remain a reliable proxy for social impact of research (though the exploration continues).

It also means that the authors of this more recent paper in PLoS Genetics have probably taken a more proactive approach to dissemination within a closely-knit international community in the discipline. The journal of choice also plays an important role here – the Public Library of Science is an Open Access publisher and pioneered the adoption of article-level metrics quite a long time ago. On top of all this, the publication has been picked by AlphaGalileo, who have published and interview with the first author at Liverpool John Moores University.

A short introductory talk "Exploring Prehistory with Ancient DNA" delivered within the Aberdeen Little Lectures by Linus Girdland-Flink back in 2020 is available on YouTube, proving the point on proactiveness and international collaborative work in the discipline.

[strathoa]

Twitter turbulences and their impact on Altmetric scores

Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian at U Strathclyde

This is the first post in a series of informal musings on public ownership of scholarly comms-related infrastructure. This topic is very dear to the staff working in the domain at public research-performing organisations – including at U Strathclyde – and the series may subsequently see input from different members of the institutional Scholarly Publications and Research Data (SPRD) team.

Just a few days ago – on Fri Mar 17th, 2023 – news emerged in mainstream media on a ground-breaking research work conducted in Aberdeen and Edinburgh about a breast cancer-inducing gene (BRCA1) that could be traced back to some distant Orkney ancestor. This was a particularly inspiring piece of news not just because it was coming from Scotland but – mainly – because of its social implications in terms of ‘precision medicine’ application (Iceland came of course instantly to mind).

The news was very good – not the most frequent case these days unfortunately – and subsequently featured in lots of mainstream outlets beyond the usual university websites and niche research forums. One got to hear about it on BBC Radio 4 but there were pieces about it on the BBC and STV websites, The Guardian, the Aberdonian Press and Journal, the National and the Daily Mail among many other sources. Upon learning of the news – not something one should be particularly proud of given this specific genetics research work seems to have been going on for 25 years – the logical next step was to check the (Open Access) journal article in the European Journal of Human Genetics where the research findings were reported that gave rise to the hype.

The article web page contained a link to its Altmetric score – which one automatically assumed would eventually become massive same as for other high-impact research outputs in the recent past. Eventually because at the time of checking (the next day after the widespread media reporting) the score was just 15. So one kept the URL for the Altmetric page for the article in order to revisit it every week or so and witness the expected steep increase.

However, this steep increase has not materialised – or at least it has not five days after the news first broke out. This is bizarre. An Altmetric score of 17 for a paper that has featured essentially everywhere? Very strange. One could argue that it may be the news channels’ fault if they haven’t included the DOI of the article in the text or its associated metadata for their pieces, but this doesn’t look too credible an explanation – media have surely followed standard practice around this and Altmetric’s standard practice is to ‘catch’ these references regardless of whether or not the levers are there.

So the most likely explanation one is able to fathom is that the ‘Twitter crisis’ may be hitting services largely based on social media impact. It’s not just that the desertion of large swathes of very active communicators in the scholarly comms domain to Mastodon has dried up the references (tweets) that should be there for Altmetric to catch. It’s – presumably – also that such a hit to the information-gathering workflow and to its associated business model has somehow rendered the Altmetric snapshot unreliable. The impact of this paper a week after release has surely been higher than 17 (as of Mar 21st, screenshot posted at the top).

Reflections on the domino-effect impact of the recent Twitter ‘turbulences’ may or may not have been published already – one hasn’t been able to identify much in the way of analysis so far beyond the internal conversations held behind closed doors at institutions. But if there haven’t yet been any, it’s reasonable to expect a good number of them to come out sooner rather than later.

From an institutional blogger’s perspective, the main reflection on this saga is that it provides yet another piece of evidence for the convenience of relying on publicly-owned services and data sources for a sustainable management of the scholarly comms domain. It’s not that public ownership will necessarily provide the desired safeguards to prevent the unravelling of a service stack – the recent discontinuation of the funding for CORE is a case in point – but at least it warrants public institutions a certain margin for action.

So while we continue to look into this issue around Almetric scores – the score for this EJHG paper has climbed to 22 between the writing and the posting of these paragraphs – it's worth bearing in mind these scores may no longer be as reliable a proxy for research impact as they once where (a statement that many will dispute anyway).

[cogitoergodeusnonest]

Collect and analyse your Altmetric data

Collect and analyse your Altmetric data

Last week I reported that I had finally delved into the world of R Shiny to create an app that calculates relative citation-based ranks for researchers.

I’m almost slightly embarrassed to say that Shiny was so addictive that I ended up making another app.

This new app takes any list of user-supplied digital object identifiers (doi) and fetches their Altmetric data for you.

View On WordPress

[myousuf78]

5 Minutes Information Channel episode # 33 Altmetrics Part I, What is th...

[cogitoergodeusnonest]

Does high exposure on social and traditional media lead to more citations?

Does high exposure on social and traditional media lead to more citations?

One of the things that I’ve often wondered about is whether making the effort to spread your scientific article’s message as far and wide as possible on social media actually brings you more citations.

While there’s more than enough justification to promote your work widely for non-academic purposes, there is some doubt as to whether the effort reaps academic awards as well.

Back in 2011 (the…

View On WordPress

[butterflyhunt]

The 2018 Altmetric Top 100 Outputs with ‘Comics’ as Keyword

The 2018 Altmetric Top 100 Outputs with ‘Comics’ as Keyword #altmetrictop100 #comics #openaccess

As it’s that time of the year and Altmetric has released it’s Top 100, in this post I share the 2018 Top 100 research outputs with ‘comics’ as a keyword according to Altmetric.

I queried the data from the Altmetric Explorer, looking for all outputs with this keyword between 13/12/2017 and 13/12/2018. I then refined the data to concentrate only on the Top 100 outputs about comics.

Here’s the top…

View On WordPress

[butterflyhunt]

The 2016 Altmetric Top 100 Outputs with 'Comics' as Keyword

New bloggage. The 2016 #AltmetricTop100 Outputs with '#Comics' as Keyword

Any frequent readers of this blog will be aware I am interested in article level metrics. I am particularly interested in the work done by Altmetric. Last week they published their annual top 100 list. I wrote this post about it.

 The Altmetric Exploreris a tool for measuring the attention that scholarly articles receive online, and its intuitive user interface works as a search engine that…

View On WordPress

[butterflyhunt]

Insights from the Altmetric Top 100 2016

Insights from The @altmetric Top 100 2016 #altmetrictop100

The Altmetric Top 100 2016 was published yesterday. If you click on the green ‘read more about this list’ button, you’ll see useful analysis of the data.

[I also wrote about the Altmetric Top 100 2014, here and here.]

It’s very welcome that this year Altmetric has deposited the article and affiliation data as two datasets as a collection on figshare:

Engineering, Altmetric (2016): Altmetric Top…

View On WordPress