The advent of publication extenders for healthcare professionals
Altmetric was launched with the aim to provide article level metrics so that researchers could measure the impact of their work beyond academic circles. The insights into understanding research influence on people and communities have made Altmetrics invaluable: the Altmetric donut can be found on millions of articles across many publishers’ websites today.
In the meantime, the research landscape continued to evolve. Today, alongside research articles, many publishers include publication extenders: educational microcontent such as animations, videos and plain-language summaries to draw attention to new research. These are designed for quick consumption and easy sharing and can extend the reach of academic and scientific publications.
A recent comment article in Current Medical Research and Opinion, co-authored by Mike Taylor, Head of Data Insights at Digital Science, discusses the different article level metric services that are currently available to the scientific research community, and considers their ability to evaluate the impact of these publication extenders.
The authors highlight the volume of new research and the need for new tools to evaluate the content that sits around it. “An analysis of the volume of medical literature relevant to primary care published in a month concluded that healthcare professionals would need to read for 29 hours a day to keep up,” they write. The reality is that these professionals have just two hours of learning time each week, so while they still see the journal publication as the key information source, they have a strong preference for digesting this educational microcontent.
Alongside metrics for peer-reviewed publication, content performance metrics are needed for these publication extenders. The comment paper takes a look at what is available at an article level and makes the case for evolution of the field to encompass publication extenders.
The Altmetric Attention Score is the most widely used article level metric. It aggregates the volume and reach of research mentions across various platforms, such as news outlets, social media, policy documents, and blogs, weighting each source according to the amount of attention it receives — media ranks higher than blogs or social media, for example. This score helps gauge the broader public interest and engagement with a research article, offering a quick visual summary of online attention. Others, PlumX, the EMPIRE Index, BEAM and Scite take slightly different approaches and the scores will be weighted depending on their stakeholders or intended audience. The diverse nature of ALMs means they have a variety of potential uses and users, ranging from funders and academic institutions, medical and pharmaceutical companies. They can be used to identify topics that are gaining a lot of attention or impact, or to find key opinion leaders or seek collaborators within a research area.
The range of options shows how the field has grown since 2011, but now there is a need to expand focus and consider how to measure publication extendenders to evaluate their use. Though it is early days for publication extender metrics, they are technically simple to implement on platforms intended for healthcare professionals. The reach and engagement of ‘regular’ content is measured using established content performance metrics for online content, perhaps encompassing online views, organic search traffic, time spent on page, scroll depth, click-through rate, video play rate and watch time, and consumption rates for audio content.
In a similar way, metrics that evaluate educational microcontent could be used to provide a measure of attention or impact for a research article or a topic, or to find key researchers, key opinion leaders, and digital opinion leaders in an area. The authors write that it is important that users carefully consider specific communication objectives and audiences and choose the appropriate metrics to use. At the moment, article level metrics lack the ability to provide a clear and concise measurement of a publication’s impact and an explanation of its value, especially to non-publication professionals. The authors are hoping that further refinement and innovation will bring this capability to the field.
To know more about the Altmetric Attention Score, visit the webpage.