Altmetric Blog

The kinds of attention that scholarly articles receive often tell interesting stories. In the “Interactions” weekly series of blog posts, we look at how intertwining conversations and differing views of the general public, scientists, medical professionals, and science communicators contribute to the overall impact of a scholarly article.   Capturing the nuances of digital attention The number of citations that an article receives has long been used as a standard measure of research impact. However, citation counts cannot capture the nature of the attention (such as whether the response is positive or negative) is also critical for assessing a … Read More

“The Web lets us move beyond the article and beyond the Impact Factor. But, strangely…we haven’t. Or perhaps it’s not so strange when we consider that the scholarly reward system we’ve inherited is in fact built squarely on these two features.” Altmetrics pioneers Jason Priem & Heather Piwowar announce ImpactStory,  a new webapp aiming to provide a broader picture of impact to help scholars understand more about the audience and reach of their research. “The “publish or perish” model of the academic world has followed a similar pattern since the middle of the last century. It generally … Read More

The kinds of attention that scholarly articles receive often tell interesting stories. In the “Interactions” weekly series of blog posts, we look at how intertwining conversations and differing views of the general public, scientists, medical professionals, and science communicators contribute to the overall impact of a scholarly article.   The current champion of the Altmetric database is an article which appeared nearly 12 years ago in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), and has been mentioned in over 11,000 tweets since 2011. As part of an end-of-year holiday joke special, the CMAJ published the article by Sarah Shea and colleagues … Read More