Re-imagining the top 100

Posted by Sarah Condon on 9th November 2021

Many of you will be familiar with the annual Altmetric Top 100. Launched in 2013, this list highlighted the most-mentioned scholarly publications from the year, and featured much-discussed topical research that had caught the wider public’s imagination. 

Since its launch, the Top 100 has demonstrated the influence and reach that it is possible for research to have – and through our data we have shown that communicating beyond the academy is critical to the broader dissemination and application of academic study. 

Given the evolving landscape of research communication and analyses, we have decided it’s time to refresh our annual review of society’s engagement with research. Instead of continuing to produce a typical ‘Top 100’, in future years we will focus our analyses on the unique opportunities our data offers: identifying emerging trends, highlighting examples of great engagement, and encouraging researchers to communicate their research and its outcomes as effectively as possible. 

As a result of this change we will not be producing an official Top 100 this year.  

But fear not! As a final farewell to the original lists, Altmetric’s Head of Data Insights, Mike Taylor, will be sharing a series of blog posts that each take a different approach to compiling a ‘top 100’ – and analysing the data to draw out the key considerations of each approach.  

Following the blog series we will be in touch with various customers and users within the community to obtain their thoughts, ideas and inputs to help us shape the future report.