Altmetric Blog

What kinds of research did people talk about in March?  For once, non-health topics were more prominently featured – people talked about Facebook, mind melds, Sudoku, and climate science. Here is another Interactions monthly wrap-up featuring a selection of 5 new and popular articles in the Altmetric database. Data are accurate as of 27 March 2013.   2. Impact of insufficient sleep on total daily energy expenditure, food intake, and weight gainPublished on 11 March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Health topics always seem to be popular on our High Five lists (see … Read More

People can contribute to science in many different ways. Training to become a scientist is one way, and donating money to fund research is another. But in recent years, many people have been donating their free time and participating in the process of scientific discovery in a rather unconventional way: by playing computer games.   Citizen scientists and the Foldit phenomenon To understand the phenomenon of computer gaming for the greater good, let’s first take a step back and define “citizen science” in general. The term refers broadly to the participation of members of the public in scientific … Read More

In parallel with the work we’ve been doing on our text-mining news tracking mechanism, we’ve also been working on enriching the context for our Altmetric scores. On its own, the Altmetric score gives an impression of the quantity of attention that a paper has received. However, the score itself doesn’t necessarily capture the whole picture of attention. For instance, we might want to know if this amount of attention is “typical” for articles that were published at a similar time. Or, we might wonder if this amount of attention exceeds the levels expected for other … Read More

What can alt-metrics tell us about the use of digital data repositories? Publishing findings in a peer-reviewed article is no longer the only way that a researcher can be recognised for his or her research outputs. Since non-traditional impacts of journal articles can be assessed using alt-metrics, it also makes sense to determine what alt-metrics reveal for datasets and other research outputs. The scientific community has been moving towards increased openness, and academics have begun to make datasets, videos, presentations, and a plethora of other research outputs freely available and citable through digital repositories, notably figshare and Dryad. Many researchers have … Read More

Pinterest is a social bookmarking platform that is used for sharing (“pinning”) images, media, and webpages that feature virtually any topic, from vegan cooking to modern art. With over 48.7 million users as of February 2013 (according to comScore), Pinterest has become a massive social media platform that can deliver instant, community-curated inspiration. (I’ve joined the fun as well, and have been pinning my Interactions cartoons from this blog.) Pinterest’s science and nature category appears to be quite active, but the images and links found here are generally unrelated to peer-reviewed research. However, people do pin figures … Read More