If you’re interested in media and culture as it pertains to what’s the most searched titles in science, check out the latest journal Nature’s “Nature News Blog.” When considering how culture impacts social media, a highly recommended article was published on December 21, 2012 that tells readers just what altmetrics can do for research.
Altmetrics uses one approach to measure attention on social media –that is what social media mentions about research, especially science. Altmetrics can be used when you want to see how many times research papers or citations to research papers have been researched, downloaded, mentioned in the social media, or collected in online libraries. Also check out the website, Mendeley.com, a reference manager and social academic network that counts 2 million users. And see the article, “How to choose a good scientific problem.”
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. The site tell you want you can import, search, and generate, such as the following information:
- Automatically generate bibliographies
- Collaborate easily with other researchers online
- Easily import papers from other research software
- Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
- Access your papers from anywhere online
- Read papers on the go, with our new iPhone app
These online sites measure how many times people click on research papers or cite them
The advantage to people interested in media and culture world-wide, including local Sacramento media and/or culture is that these online sites that measure how any times people click on research papers can provide nearly a real-time view of the research papers that are trending, looked up frequently, cited, or paid attention to by people going online and using the title of the research paper, key words, or related topics.
The real-time aspect of this type of trending, that is media and social media searching using online search engines provides a view in the quickest time possible to most readers as to what papers are generating the most public interest. The old media way uses citations that take a long time before the citations get into library collections, or even online library collections. You get a real time view of the papers. Check out the article by Richard Van Noorden in the journal Nature, (Nature News Blog, December 21, 2012), “What were the top papers of 2012 on social media?”
See another study’s abstract, “Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact.” In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications.
The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics, notes the abstract.
The study, “Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact,” explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or “altmetrics,” sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science.
Those researchers found that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, whereas close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library, according to that study’s abstract.
There’s an encouraging diversity. Expert researchers found that a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone.
Scientists looked for correlations about citations of research studies and how many times people search for them
There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact “flavors,” capturing impacts of different types on different audiences. Researchers gave examples such as some articles noted that may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.
In another article, Richard Van Noorden in the journal Nature, (Nature News Blog, December 21, 2012), “What were the top papers of 2012 on social media?” The author noted that the journal Nature, in the Nature News Blog, also publishes its review of 2012. What the Nature science journal’s publishers did was to ask altmetrics experts to pick out the most noted papers of the year.
The company, Altmetric.com, is noted in Van Noorden’s article as a product of Digital Science, and also is a sister company to Nature Publishing Group, which publishes the blog, Nature.com. If you’re in media or social media, technology is busy tracking public, direct mentions of specific research papers online by picking up DOI references.
How many hits are trending are kept track of by these online media measuring companies
The only concern of media enthusiasts is that articles that really had a lot of hits, that are trending, may not be linked to directly by readers. There also are many non-public Facebook links. Additionally, articles published earlier in the year would have had a lot more time to be researched. The blog lists the top tend researched articles.
Check out Altmetric’s posting that’s an up-to-date listing of the top 10 articles, with more details on the online conversations around each paper. If you’re into research, you may want to know that 67% of the tweeters on the Fukushima paper came from Japan. Hot topics include rape-related pregnancy, the Fukushima, Japan nuclear accident, and bright minds with dark attitudes.
Research papers can focus on attitudes and behavior, music, medicine, nutrition, video games, health, or the physical and biological sciences
There’s even a research paper on greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and lower cognitive ability. And there’s a research paper on higher social class and more unethical behavior choices. You may want to read the research paper on gender bias in hiring scientists.
As for musicians, check out the research paper on the evolution of western music. Scientists measured the evolution of contemporary western popular music. Even classic Nintendo games have a research paper cited. The papers had catchy titles which may have helped make them popular, and most did make international media. These are the top ten listed in the article by Richard Van Noorden in the journal Nature, (Nature News Blog, December 21, 2012), “What were the top papers of 2012 on social media?”
- The biological impacts of the Fukushima nuclear accident on the pale grass blue butterfly (2,142 people tweeting; 9 on blogs; 3 reddit posts; 131 Facebook posts and 9 G+ direct DOI links).
- Association of coffee drinking with total and cause-specific mortality (1,620; 4; 11; 40; 18)
- Rape-related pregnancy: estimates and descriptive characteristics from a national sample of women (a 1996 paper) (1,594; 6; 1; 90; 2)
- Food for thought. What you eat depends on your sex and eating companions (a 2009 paper) (1,606; 0; 0; 0; 0)
- Bright minds and dark attitudes: lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and low intergroup contact
(1,411; 11; 4; 38; 25)
- Unilateral dermatoheliosis (1,124; 6; 1; 102; 57)
- Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior (1,218; 3; 9; 7; 12)
- Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students (1,029; 8; 21; 89; 32)
- Measuring the evolution of contemporary western popular music (908; 2; 5; 98; 23)
- Classic Nintendo games are (NP-)hard (904; 9; 4; 10; 62).
Take a look at the most read article as of 30 November, 2012 at the article’s site, “What were the top papers of 2012 on social media?” The paper listed as the most read focused on the topic of DNA in the human genome.
See the titles researched the most, which focused on DNA studies, research papers trending, such as “An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome.” Van Noorden’s article also discusses citations from Thomson Reuters who provided the data for the blog’s giant infographic of papers published by the top countries in 2012.
The Higgs Boson research paper also is cited 140 times. See, Combined search for the Standard Model Higgs boson using up to 4.9 fb(-1) of pp collision data at root s=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Another hot topic emphasized health. See, Is cancer a metabolic rebellion against host aging? In the quest for immortality, tumor cells try to save themselves by boosting mitochondrial metabolism.
These companies measure the popularity of research papers or their citations using social media and search engine trends and ‘hits’
How many people clicked on what to research? How many people went to social media to find answers? All of these scientific research papers in the media and/or in scholarly journals were at the peak of popularity or citation-strength under different measures.
Altmetrics and citations are picking up different facets of attention.
Can scientists prove anything wanted in the media using statistics? Most journalists didn’t have a course in statistics if they majored in the humanities or journalism. But most social scientists and life science majors do understand statistics. What people writing the news may not be aware of is how often anything can be shown as fact by using statistics. And media people often quote what experts tell them, some without having the experience or coursework to understand the nuances of how research studies by experts can use statistics to prove a theory or a point.
You can check out all the top cited articles and searched articles in 2012 listed at the article site
What’s important to remember is that social media plays a role in media searches, search engine trends, and social media mentions, where a decade ago, citations and search engine trends were slower. As more information overwhelms researchers, time becomes reduced and more information gets cited or at least kept track of somewhere online by a business.
Since the article focused on science searches and citations, you’d have to go to other sources to find out how many people searched for general consumer key words such as recipes for a certain type of food, celebrity gossip, or what brand to buy of a gadget, tool, or appliance. Does the average consumer have the time to read the information overload online? Not really. That’s why social media and search engine trends and clicks are recorded and analyzed. It’s part of publishing and media research.
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