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.

The Altmetric company logo

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’:

A screenshot from Pure showing that the article has an Altmetric score of 24
A journal article presented in Pure. An Altmetric score of 24 is displayed

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

An image showing the top scoring research for the Faculty of Education. Professor Tim Cain is the author of the highest scoring piece, which received 54 based on Twitter users.

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

An image showing the top scoring research for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Dr Linda Kaye is the author of the highest scoring piece, which received 157 based on news outlets and Twitter users.

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

An image showing the top scoring research for the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Medicine. Professor Lucy Brayis the author of the highest scoring piece, which received 67 based on Twitter users and one news outlet.

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].