Altmetric Blog

Stacy Konkiel, Director of Research Relations at Altmetric, breaks down five of the most useful and interesting tidbits about Altmetric data.    Though Altmetric’s name is practically synonymous with altmetrics as a larger field of practice, there are a lot of things the larger community may not know about our data and how we track it! We’ve collected 95.8 million mentions of 12.4 million works to date, across 17 distinct types of data sources. Altmetric tracks research in all its diverse formats: books, articles, data sets, clinical trials, book chapters, news stories, websites, blog posts, reports, white papers, and … Read More

In the first of our new regular monthly blog posts written by Science Wordsmith Lucy Goodchild, we explore the findings and attention around a piece of research published in the previous month that caught the public’s attention. Listen to the accompanying podcast here. Why a sleep study in Science Advances caught the world’s attention. Teenagers are lazy. They sleep in, they’re tired when they go to school and they don’t perform as well as they could. Sound familiar? Teenagers hear this kind of criticism a lot. Yet, on the whole, it’s not laziness but biology that’s making them sleep longer – and … Read More

In this post, scientometrics researcher and 2018 Altmetric Research Grant recipient Shenmeng Xu describes how the design of China’s largest social network, WeChat, may affect what we know about how science is communicated. Altmetrics sourced from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and ResearchGate have been studied a lot to date. WeChat (微信), China’s largest social network, is different from the above-mentioned tools in many aspects, including the technological functionalities, user groups, languages used, among others—and in the fact that it is relatively unstudied among scientometrics researchers. With the growing number and internationalization of users, WeChat has become an important platform for scholarly communication, offering … Read More

The Altmetric team’s diary is already full of exciting conferences, events and workshops across the globe where we’ll be talking to our users and spreading the word about our latest product developments, partnerships and integrations. If you’re planning to attend any of the following events please don’t hesitate to chat to one of our team and ask them about the projects we’re working on. Here’s where we’ll be: Academic Publishing in Europe,14th-16th January, Berlin, Germany Kathy Christian will be attending the Academic Publishing in Europe conference in Berlin from the 14th – 16th January.   … Read More

In this post, Stacy Konkiel, Director of Research Relations at Altmetric, gathers and categorizes the altmetrics related research that published this year. In 2018, the amount of Altmetric-related research that we’re aware of tripled. Typically, this research is quantitative in nature and offers new insights about the way research is communicated. Here, I’ve collected and categorized all 80+ known articles, preprints and conference proceedings published in 2018 that analyze Altmetric data. We’re proud to continue to support scientometrics researchers worldwide by offering access to our data, free of charge–something we’ve … Read More

It’s a very special time of year for us at Altmetric. For the 6th year in a row, we are releasing our annual Altmetric Top 100, a list that highlights research from the past year that has garnered significant international online attention and discussion. View the 2018 Altmetric Top 100 Many of this year’s most important issues feature in this year’s … Read More

Next week, Altmetric will release the list of the Top 100 most popular articles of 2018. As we learned in last week’s blog post, the annual Top 100 list has seen many interesting topics and trends in the last five years. Though the Altmetric Top 100 includes only articles, Altmetric has also tracked the online attention surrounding scholarly books since 2016. In this post, we’ll supplement the 2018 Top 100 by having an additional look at trends for the Top 20 books that received the most … Read More

Since December 2013 we’ve tracked, collated, blogged and podcasted about the most talked about papers that have been published each year, giving a rundown of which topics caught the public’s imagination. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the insights and trends we’ve seen in Top 100 lists from 2013 to 2017, ahead of the release of the 2018 Top 100 next month. Health research takes the top spot Since the very first annual Top 100 list was created, health-related research papers have been the most talked about overall. Some of the most … Read More

In this second part of the two-part guest post by Steve Dudley, Chief Operations Officer of the British Ornithologists Union (BOU), he discusses how individuals and society publishers can use online channels to enhance their research communications. Read part 1 ‘Social media mentions deliver citations of research articles’ here. Part 2: Using social media to promote your research articles Adapted from an article first published in ISMTE’s EON(March 2018, Issue 11)   The BOU – 160 years old, digital, dynamic and social The BOU is 160 years old. Like many, particularly older, societies, adapting to the fast-changing … Read More

In this first of a two-part guest blog post, Steve Dudley, Chief Operations Officer of the British Ornithologists Union (BOU) summarises the results from his recently published article in ISMTE looking at the positive effects of promoting research on Twitter. The second part of this blog post will be published tomorrow (November 15th).   Part 1: social media mentions deliver citations of research articles Adapted from an article first published in ISMTE’s EON(March 2018, Issue 11) When you publish your research you look for impact. Impact comes in different forms, but most publishing academics strive … Read More