Introduction
We're a London based start-up that tracks the conversations around scholarly articles for publishers, funders & institutions.
Our view
The "Alternative" part is "alternative to only using citations", not "alternative to citations".
Not a drop in replacement for citation based analysis or media monitoring.
Instead it's complementary - helps you fill in some missing pieces of the impact puzzle.
Do scientists really talk about papers online?
Yes. Approximately 600k new articles shared each year, at least 1.3M saved to online reference managers
Lower-bound for number of scholarly articles shared online
We match ~ 35% of the articles searched for on Scopus.
Between June 14th and June 21st '12 Altmetric saw:
- 15,151 new papers (not seen previously)
- ~ 30,000 total papers mentioned
In context: avg. num new articles each fortnight in:
- PubMed ~ 39,000 articles
- RePEC + SSRN ~ 9,000 articles (?)
- arXiv ~ 3,500 articles
So a significant fraction shared but prob < half.
How much sharing per article early on?
Looking in July 2011 at a random sample of 108k articles known to have been published in previous six months
54% (59k) have only one mention
89% (96k) have 5 or fewer mentions
0.3% (427) have 100+ mentions
Where do scientists share public links to papers online?
Data collected between Sep 19th - 26th 2012
| Service | Mentions | As % |
| Twitter posts | 43,542 | 91.7% |
| Public Facebook posts | 3,181 | 6.7% |
| Reddit posts | 154 | 0.3% |
| Pinterest posts | 133 | 0.2% |
| Blog posts | 430 | 0.9% |
Growing: Unique articles mentioned, Twitter (+13%), Facebook & Pinterest (+60%)
Shrinking: Google+, blogs
How many people are sharing links to articles?
468,000 tweeters collected Jul '11 - Jul '12 (lower bound)
(in context: there are 6 - 10 million scientists worldwide)
62,358 (13%) shared more than one paper
6,933 (1.4%) shared more then ten papers
Highly cited OA journals get the most coverage
Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) weights citations, given higher value in subjects where citations are less frequent.
Looked at all journals in PubMed Jan-Mar '12 with a SNIP in 2009, at least 10 papers with DOIs.
| Journal set | Size | Coverage % |
| Mean | ||
| All | 3,705 | 21.9% |
| SNIP >= 0.5 | 1,905 | 29.5% |
| All OA | 349 | 21.6% |
| OA, SNIP >= 0.5 | 106 | 45.3% |
Thanks for listening!
Feel free to get in touch at euan@altmetric.com with questions / comments.