<aside> 🖋️ by Ben McLeish, Product Sales Team Lead, EMEA, Altmetric
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Do you really know where your research has been talked about?
On the internet there exists a very large but often hard to detect online audience for research. Social media, online news, blogs, policy papers and even YouTube videos regularly discuss, cite and share research publications, driving discoveries and developments to hundreds of millions of the general public across the globe.
This dissemination of research to - and often by -  the general public has become a rightful focus of research programs, which are taking up the task of measuring not just academic impact and proliferation (usually in the form of academic citation tracking) but broader dissemination within the populace, within policy initiatives, and within global inventions. Many funders and research bodies now require a strategy for dissemination, and the tools to measure and track how, when and where this dissemination takes place. It’s this dissemination and tracking of where your research has ended up making waves online that Altmetric is focused on.
Traditionally, tracking or reporting on this broader engagement with research outside of the academic realm has been somewhat overlooked or has seemed technically insurmountable for research groups to tackle. Hard pressed for time as they are, researchers have few resources to build complex systems to track where research might ultimately show up on the net.
We therefore decided as we were developing our service that we needed to capture all the attention we possibly could to as many research items as we can detect, regardless of where the research publication comes from. This means that those applying for Horizon Europe funding can now point to services which track alternative metrics for research dissemination as one of the major data services and sources when it comes to planning dissemination and exploitation of research results - meaning there’s a clear strategy long before the research has been published, as well as reliable attention data monitoring the research after it’s published.
Altmetric is now the industry leader in tracking where research has been disseminated and shared in online media, policy and social platforms. We’ve been capturing where research is linked to, shared or is otherwise cited across the web since 2012. Since then Altmetric has captured nearly 300 million references to around 22 million research outputs across thousands of sources and websites, resulting in an enormous database of mentions of research items.
By default Altmetric proactively looks for any item that can be recognised as a research output or publication. We do this by monitoring links to publisher websites, scholarly identifiers such as DOIs, ArXiv IDs, SSRN or RePEc identifiers or Pubmed IDs among others. And because many blogs, news sites and practically all social media are in the habit of shortening, and therefore disguising, links, we’ve also built a large link-shortener tracker that resolves nearly 9,000 different shortening services back to their original length. If that link goes to a known source of publications, we capture that attention.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/VQ019LUYww007-Mu1FqqyQvstC64e-SwOLsgqai3OMJ9nnA3DYM8AoxfoRUoImXc1dEl-u4iFFA2wmed1ykuEFe891qlQpJiwJDPuFglptQbVP3radba5r32RIqVZOC064-SlAkeudx83NKfaiC4OLxRtksiUd_vFyp6l-4DVZBvg2FIAeicAoKl8w
Social media notoriously generates new links every time an item is shared. Altmetric tracks all these link variations for researchers.
Under the hood, Altmetric is actively monitoring for links to research across 6,000 news sites in 41 languages, 10,000 blogs, all of Twitter, Reddit threads, Wikipedia in 31 languages, all global patents, 495 different policy bodies, Facebook groups, YouTube channels and more.
In practical terms, this means that when research groups or even large institutions such as universities need these data, we usually have historical data up to the moment they reach out.
What’s been fascinating in looking at the overall trends of how the globe shares research is how voluminous it is, and how it keeps rising year on year. Since 2012 the volume of attention has nearly doubled annually, and reached 81 million mentions between 2020 and 2021. And while those years featured a truly unprecedented focus on research dissemination, the world wide web does look to be on trend in sharing roughly as much this year and next.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nJJoYilXAdEfGRqG2lXiV2dK5hMbEv1C2tgZLt4FbvFzeZVor3o6_ak5rwNuShk-tEashA0xLE_T7w4JWIYYObhbguqiD73dkxNDu_-a5jGXB9zxwB7_8Xw1MxVJL7tpaCNwOeT2dWYgtajqIpUfLscyAuaw1Ab7cITBNScaXzCQk6uWY0U6w0OsEg
Attention Timeline: The Altmetric Explorer already contains 230 million records of interaction with research
The other fascinating trend is that people really do share a lot less research on weekends. Without fail, Fridays to Sundays see a slump in the number of posts about research. During the week the audience is bigger!
If you want to make sure Altmetric is capturing the attention your research receives, make it trackable. Publishers already use scholarly identifiers, so Altmetric already captures published articles. If your research includes the production of datasets, your best bet is to get these uploaded onto a dataset-hosting platform such as figshare or Zenodo, since these also create identifiers for each dataset you upload, which means it’s immediately detectable by our various collectors if it gets shared or linked to.
<aside> 📨 If in doubt, give us a shout
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