Archives des mots-clés : Altmetrics

Open access publications drive few visits from Google Search results to institutional repositories

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Authors : Enrique Orduña‑Malea, Cristina I. Font‑Julián

Given the importance of Google Search in generating visits to institutional repositories (IR), a lack of visibility in search engine results pages can hinder the possibility of their publications being found, read, downloaded, and, eventually, cited.

To address this, institutions need to evaluate the visibility of their repositories to determine what actions might be implemented to enhance them. However, measuring the search engine optimization (SEO) visibility of IRs requires a highly accurate, technically feasible method. This study constitutes the first attempt to design such a method, specifically applied here to measuring the IR visibility of Spain’s national university system in Google Search based on a set of SEO-based metrics derived from the Ubersuggest SEO tool.

A comprehensive dataset spanning three months and comprising 217,589 bibliographic records and 316,899 organic keywords is used as a baseline. Our findings show that many records deposited in these repositories are not ranked among the top positions in Google Search results, and that the most visible records are mainly academic works (theses and dissertations) written in Spanish in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

However, most visits are generated by a small number of records. All in all, our results call into question the role played by IRs in attracting readers via Google Search to the institutions’ scientific heritage and serve to underscore the prevailing emphasis within IRs on preservation as opposed to online dissemination.

Potential improvements might be achieved using enhanced metadata schemes and normalized description practices, as well as by adopting other actionable insights that can strengthen the online visibility of IRs.

This study increases understanding of the role played by web indicators in assessing the web-based impact of research outputs deposited in IRs, and should be of particular interest for a range of stakeholders, including open access and open science advocates, research agencies, library practitioners, repository developers, and website administrators.

URL : Open access publications drive few visits from Google Search results to institutional repositories

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05175-0

Altmetric.com or PlumX: Does it matter?

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Authors : Behrooz Rasuli, Majid Nabavi

Facing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, medical publishers rose to the occasion, moving to make their full portfolio of COVID-19–related research available to read for free and expediting peer review and production processes. With such a rapid transition from paper submission to publication, however, concerns also arose regarding whether the quality of the research publication process was being affected. This article seeks to document the transformation of medical publishers’ practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and briefly discuss where they may go from here. For this goal, a literature search was performed in PubMed at several points to identify papers that reported early trends in how medical publishers handled COVID-19 research.

URL : Altmetric.com or PlumX: Does it matter?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1625

Scientific discourse on YouTube: Motivations for citing research in comments

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Authors : Sören Striewski, Olga Zagovora, Isabella Peters

YouTube is a valuable source of user-generated content on a wide range of topics, and it encourages user participation through the use of a comment system. Video content is increasingly addressing scientific topics, and there is evidence that both academics and consumers use video descriptions and video comments to refer to academic research and scientific publications.

Because commenting is a discursive behavior, this study will provide insights on why individuals post links to research publications in comments. For this, a qualitative content analysis and iterative coding approach were applied. Furthermore, the reasons for mentioning academic publications in comments were contrasted with the reasons for citing in scholarly works and with reasons for commenting on YouTube.

We discovered that the primary motives for sharing research links were (1) providing more insights into the topic and (2) challenging information offered by other commentators.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12798

Between Flat-Earthers and Fitness Coaches: Who is Citing Scientific Publications in YouTube Video Descriptions?

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Authors : Olga Zagovora, Katrin Weller

In this study, we undertake an extensive analysis of YouTube channels that reference research publications in their video descriptions, offering a unique insight into the intersection of digital media and academia. Our investigation focuses on three principal aspects: the background of YouTube channel owners, their thematic focus, and the nature of their operational dynamics, specifically addressing whether they work individually or in groups. Our results highlight a strong emphasis on content related to science and engineering, as well as health, particularly in channels managed by individual researchers and academic institutions.

However, there is a notable variation in the popularity of these channels, with professional YouTubers and commercial media entities often outperforming in terms of viewer engagement metrics like likes, comments, and views. This underscores the challenge academic channels face in attracting a wider audience. Further, we explore the role of academic actors on YouTube, scrutinizing their impact in disseminating research and the types of publications they reference.

Despite a general inclination towards professional academic topics, these channels displayed a varied effectiveness in spotlighting highly cited research. Often, they referenced a wide array of publications, indicating a diverse but not necessarily impact-focused approach to content selection.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15083

Societal and scientific impact of policy research: A large-scale empirical study of some explanatory factors using Altmetric and Overton

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Authors: Pablo Dorta-González, Alejandro Rodríguez-Caro, María Isabel Dorta-González

This study investigates how scientific research influences policymaking by analyzing citations of research articles in policy documents (policy impact) for nearly 125,000 articles across 434 public policy journals. We reveal distinct citation patterns between policymakers and other stakeholders like researchers, journalists, and the public.

News and blog mentions, social media engagement, and open access publications (excluding fully open access) significantly increase the likelihood of a research article being cited in policy documents. Conversely, articles locked behind paywalls and those published under the full open access model (based on Altmetric data) have a lower chance of being policy-cited. Publication year and policy type show no significant influence. Our findings emphasize the crucial role of science communication channels like news media and social media in bridging the gap between research and policy.

Interestingly, academic citations hold a weaker influence on policy citations compared to news mentions, suggesting a potential disconnect between how researchers reference research and how policymakers utilize it. This highlights the need for improved communication strategies to ensure research informs policy decisions more effectively.

This study provides valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and science communicators. Researchers can tailor their dissemination efforts to reach policymakers through media channels. Policymakers can leverage these findings to identify research with higher policy relevance. Science communicators can play a critical role in translating research for policymakers and fostering dialogue between the scientific and policymaking communities.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06714

Who Are Tweeting About Academic Publications? A Cochrane Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Altmetric Studies

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Authors : Ashraf Maleki, Kim Holmberg

Previous studies have developed different categorizations of Twitter users who interact with scientific publications online, reflecting the difficulty in creating a unified approach. Using Cochrane Review meta-analysis to analyse earlier research (including 79,014 Twitter users, over twenty million tweets, and over five million tweeted publications from 23 studies), we created a consolidated robust categorization consisting of 11 user categories, at different dimensions, covering most of any future needs for user categorizations on Twitter and possibly also other social media platforms.

Our findings showed, with moderate certainty, covering all the earlier different approaches employed, that the predominant Twitter group was individual users (66%), responsible for the majority of tweets (55%) and tweeted publications (50%), while organizations (22%, 27%, and 28%, respectively) and science communicators (16%, 13%, and 30%) clearly contributed smaller proportions.

The cumulative findings from prior investigations indicated a statistically equal extent of academic individuals (33%) and other individuals (28%). While academic individuals shared more academic publications than other individuals (42% vs. 31%), they posted fewer tweets overall (22% vs. 30%), but these differences do not reach statistical significance.

Despite significant heterogeneity arising from variations in categorization methods, the findings consistently indicate the importance of academics in disseminating academic publications.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06399

Evaluative altmetrics: is there evidence for its application to research evaluation?

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Authors : Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado, Daniel Torres-Salinas

Introduction

Altmetrics have been demonstrated as a promising tool for analyzing scientific communication on social media. Nevertheless, its application for research evaluation remains underdeveloped, despite the advancement of research in the study of diverse scientific interactions.

Methods

This paper develops a method for applying altmetrics in the evaluation of researchers, focusing on a case study of the Environment/Ecology ESI field publications by researchers at the University of Granada. We considered Twitter as a mirror of social attention, news outlets as media, and Wikipedia as educational, exploring mentions from these three sources and the associated actors in their respective media, contextualizing them using various metrics.

Results

Our analysis evaluated different dimensions such as the type of audience, local attention, engagement generated around the mention, and the profile of the actor. Our methodology effectively provided dashboards that gave a comprehensive view of the different instances of social attention at the author level.

Discussion

The use of altmetrics for research evaluation presents significant potential, as shown by our case study. While this is a novel method, our results suggest that altmetrics could provide valuable insights into the social attention that researchers garner. This can be an important tool for research evaluation, expanding our understanding beyond traditional metrics.

URL : Evaluative altmetrics: is there evidence for its application to research evaluation?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2023.1188131