Last March I blogged about altmetrics – how many times a journal article is mentioned in social media and news outlets. There are several companies that perform this work, but Altmetric publishes a list of the top 100 articles for the past year, as measured by them.
They offer an interesting look at the articles folks were tweeting, blogging, and writing about in the news. Their site lets you filter the list by institution, country, subject, journal, access, and Altmetric score.
JHU has 6 articles listed; 5 under Johns Hopkins University and 1 as Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Let’s look at the most highly rated JHU article, number 4: Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions. It has an Altmetric score of 2,340! Yowza!
This page details all the places Altmetric found mentions of this article. Their search includes:
- News outlets – multiple languages
- Blogs
- Peer reviews – New post-publication peer review opportunities were mentioned here previously
- Weibo – the major social network in China
- Wikipedia – references by Wikipedia articles
- Google+
Take a look through all of them. It’s easy to see why these articles caught people’s attention.
#6 – How much plastic is in the ocean?
#16 – Does kissing change the microbes in your mouth?
#24 – Is there a relationship between playing sexist video games and being sexist?
#41 – Is there a relationship between illness and sitting still?
#46 – What’s the range for human penis size?
#91 – Does music relieve post-operative pain?