Using Altmetric data, we can get a picture of the most-mentioned research from Edge Hill in terms of news media, policy, bloggers, social media and more. Here are the top results, broken down by faculty.
Altmetric is a company which provides an ‘attention score’ for research, measuring the number of times an article, book chapter, conference paper, etc is mentioned in government policy, on Twitter, in the news, or even in Wikipedia articles. In calculating the score, some sources have greater weighting than others – news mentions score higher than tweet for example. The score is visualised using a spiral, sometimes called an Altmetric ‘donut’:
In the above example, the Altmetric donut is blue and red – the blue part represents the number of tweets, and the larger red area represents news media.
In this excercise, the top 50 Altmetric scores for Edge Hill University research from November 2018 – December 2019 were recorded. The top three scoring research outputs for each faculty are presented below.
Faculty of Education
Research by Tim Cain, Karen Boardman and Annabel Yale received the highest scores. The primary source of attention for the research was via Twitter users, so the Altmetric ‘donuts’ display a blue colour. Professor Cain’s article benefitted from being free-to-read for a short period of time, which many education professionals sharing the access link.
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Research by Linda Kaye, Gray Atherton & Liam Cross and Andy Sparks received the highest scores. Dr Kaye’s research benefitted from broad news outlet coverage – it was mentioned by The Telegraph, Yahoo, and many others and generated headlines such as ‘Spending a Lot of Time on WhatsApp May Actually Make You Feel Less Lonely And Boost Your Self Esteem‘. The next highest scoring research was ‘The Animal in Me…’ which received most of its attention via Twitter (193 tweets) and like the paper by Dr Sparks, is open access.
Faculty of Health, Social Care and Medicine
Scoring 67, the article by Professor Lucy Bray, Victoria Appleton and Ashley Sharpe was followed by papers by Richard Williams and Emma Jayne Pearson et al. ‘The information needs of children’ was featured in ‘The Medical News’, which focused on the study’s use of the Xploro app with children to reduce anxiety about hospital procedures. All three articles here were published open access and benefitted from attention via Twitter.
Contact
If you would like to know more about altmetrics, please contact Liam Bullingham, Research Support Librarian: [email protected].