Altmetric Blog

Lucy Goodchild explores the findings and attention around a piece of recent research that caught the public’s attention. Listen to the accompanying podcast episode here. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are information hungry: we want to know what’s happening around the world, and how we can stay safe and healthy, and look after each other. We’re looking everywhere for information – including on social media. But not everyone is finding trustworthy content. Heidi Li, a medical student at the University of Ottawa, was in a supermarket when she noticed that among the people hoarding supplies, … Read More

There’s little doubt that we are currently living in historic times. But what does the data from Facebook, blogs and news headlines on Covid-19 research tell us?  That’s what our 2020 Research Award winners hope to find out. Our award winners are Dr Fabio Castro Gouveia, a scientometrics and altmetrics specialist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil, and Dr Elaine Rabello, a researcher with dual appointments at the Institute of Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Wageningen University, Netherlands.  Dr Fabio Castro Gouveia (left) and Dr Elaine Rabello (right) are the winners of the 2020 … Read More

What role does social media play in health support and nursing education, and indeed; can it be used to influence patient outcomes? In a new special episode of the Altmetric Podcast, Digital Science’s Mike Taylor talks to children’s nurse and Senior Lecturer in Non-Medical Prescribing Kate Davies about her experience of using social media to connect directly with families impacted by particular conditions.  Mike and Kate explore how social media can bridge a gap for patients, and make it easier for those who can benefit from support materials and useful research to access them in a timely way: … Read More

Lucy Goodchild explores 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 episode here. For many people, Twitter is a place where you find memes and misbehaving politicians. Yet it seems the platform has a lot more to offer than entertainment: People have fallen in love, been arrested, made friends, and been hired and fired. How much can you achieve in 280 characters? If you get them right, quite a lot. According to the researchers behind a paper in PLoS Computational Biology, Twitter … Read More

This blog is based on an interview with Gemma Derrick, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University.   Metrics, and the responsible use of them, remains a hot topic for many institutions, particularly those in the UK who have been gearing up for their REF submissions.  This and other challenges were the focus of discussion at a recent Lis-bibliometrics event held at the University of Manchester earlier in 2020.  We caught up with one of the presenters from the day, Gemma Derrick, to get her take on altmetrics … Read More

Lucy Goodchild explores the findings and attention around a piece of research published recently that caught the public’s attention. Listen to the accompanying podcast episode here. A kid stands in the lunch queue at school. It’s been a long morning and they’re hungry. They’re faced with an array of choices – sandwiches, salads, burgers and fries. Will they go for the healthy option? According to a recent study, their choice could be influenced by what they’ve been watching on television. In a paper in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Dr. Frans Folkvord and his … Read More

Any marketing or communications professional knows that a brand’s most vital resource is its reputation, and good media monitoring helps you protect it. Media monitoring can help you to stay on top of threats to your brand’s reputation and can help you to develop your reputation further. But did you know that the Altmetric Explorer can complement your media monitoring tool?  By using Altmetric in tandem with existing media monitoring services you will have a more robust process for capturing the detail of the conversation around your research, and celebrating your successes with a broader audience. Read More

Lucy Goodchild explores 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 episode here. In the depths of the Madagascan jungle, a frog sits next to a pond on the forest floor, barking out its distinctive call – five pulsed notes delivered loudly among the symphony of about 150,000 species that are endemic to the island. It’s relatively new territory for the frog – over the course of several decades, it has been forced gradually higher, by more than half a kilometer … Read More

Being able to deliver messaging that effectively influences your target audience is the dream of any marketing team. For publisher marketing teams, engaging your authors in the promotion of their titles can boost your marketing strategy and get your titles noticed.  Altmetrics data can help; they make the perfect complement to your traditional books data.  They can help you, and your authors, understand the big picture of book impact.   Using altmetrics help you understand the big picture of book impact Altmetrics data gives you immediate insight into online mentions of your books so … Read More

Lucy Goodchild explores 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 episode here. When you see someone for the first time, you can usually guess roughly how old they are. This is because we spend our whole lives interacting with people, we see what they look like and often know how old they are, so our brains develop a sort of model we can base predictions on. Every so often, someone will surprise us – if they look significantly younger or older than … Read More