Identifying science in the news: An assessment of the precision and recall of Altmetric.com news mention data

Fleerackers, Alice; Lise, Nehring,; Maggio, Lauren A.; Enkhbayar, Asura; Moorhead, Laura; Alperin, Juan Pablo

doi:10.1007/s11192-022-04510-7

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Yet, none to our knowledge have focused on articles published in OA journals or available through green OA. It is possible that the lack of research is due to the methodological and data quality-related challenges of tracking media coverage of research ( Fleerackers et al ., 2022 ), as well as disciplinary norms for studying science journalism. With a few exceptions ( Matthias et al ., 2020 ; Van Schalkwyk & Dudek, 2022 ), SJ and communication scholars tend to identify science news stories using topic-related keyword searches, rather than by searching for coverage of specific research outputs ( Fleerackers et al ., 2022 ; Hansen, 2009 ).…”

Section: Journalists’ Use Of Open Access Publications and Preprints D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is possible that the lack of research is due to the methodological and data quality-related challenges of tracking media coverage of research ( Fleerackers et al ., 2022 ), as well as disciplinary norms for studying science journalism. With a few exceptions ( Matthias et al ., 2020 ; Van Schalkwyk & Dudek, 2022 ), SJ and communication scholars tend to identify science news stories using topic-related keyword searches, rather than by searching for coverage of specific research outputs ( Fleerackers et al ., 2022 ; Hansen, 2009 ). It is also possible that the lack of interest in this topic is linked to the fact that almost all COVID-19 research was made OA during the early pandemic period, even if only temporarily ( Besançon et al ., 2021 ; Engebretson, 2020 ).…”

Section: Journalists’ Use Of Open Access Publications and Preprints D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some evidence suggests that news coverage of COVID-19-related preprints outstripped preprints on other subjects, at least during the early months of the pandemic. In the US, UK, Brazil, Germany, and South Africa, journalists from diverse media outlets drew on COVID-19-related preprints as sources of coverage ( Fleerackers et al ., 2022 ; Massarani et al , 2021a ; Massarani & Neves, 2022 ; Simons & Schniedermann, 2023 ; Van Schalkwyk & Dudek, 2022 ). A widely cited study by Fraser et al .…”

Section: Journalists’ Use Of Open Access Publications and Preprints D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Access research

Fleerackers,

Chtena,

Pinfield

et al. 2024

F1000Res

Self Cite

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Science journalists are uniquely positioned to increase the societal impact of open research outputs by contextualizing and communicating findings in ways that highlight their relevance and implications for non-specialist audiences. Yet, it is unclear to what degree journalists use open research outputs, such as open access publications or preprints, in their reporting; what factors motivate or constrain this use; and how the recent surge in openly available research seen during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected this. This article examines these questions through a review of relevant literature published from 2018 onwards—particularly literature relating to the COVID-19 pandemic—as well as seminal articles outside the search dates. We find that research that explicitly examines journalists’ engagement with open access publications or preprints is scarce, with existing literature mostly addressing the topic tangentially or as a secondary concern, rather than a primary focus. Still, the limited body of evidence points to several factors that may hamper journalists’ use of these outputs and thus warrant further exploration. These include an overreliance on traditional criteria for evaluating scientific quality; concerns about the trustworthiness of open research outputs; and challenges using and verifying the findings. We also find that, while the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged journalists to explore open research outputs such as preprints, the extent to which these explorations will become established journalistic practices remains unclear. Furthermore, we note that current research is overwhelmingly authored and focused on the Global North, and the United States specifically. We conclude with recommendations for future research that attend to issues of equity and diversity, and more explicitly examine the intersections of open access and science journalism.

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Section: Journalists’ Use Of Open Access Publications and Preprints D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Journalists’ Use Of Open Access Publications and Preprints D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Journalists’ Use Of Open Access Publications and Preprints D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Access research

Fleerackers,

Chtena,

Pinfield

et al. 2024

F1000Res

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It identifies news stories that mention research articles either through links to the publication (i.e., through a URL or a publication identifier, such as a DOI) or mentions of study details such as author names, journal titles, and publication dates (Altmetric.com, 2018). While these data are not without issues (Ortega, 2019(Ortega, , 2020b, they can be reasonably accurate when working with a fixed set of news outlets (Fleerackers, Nehring, et al, 2022). With this limitation in mind, we restricted our query to five outlets that circulate widely on Twitter and Facebook: BBC, MSN, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.…”

Section: News Storiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One such place is the news media, which plays a critical role in shaping public discourse (Gallagher et al, 2021;McCombs, 2002) and remains a key source of public science information (Covens et al, 2018;Funk et al, 2017). Metrics that capture news coverage of research may offer insights into its societal impact that have not been captured through other altmetrics (Casino, 2018;Fleerackers, Nehring, et al, 2022;Ortega, 2020a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Second-order Citations in Altmetrics: A Case Study Analyzing the Audiences of COVID-19 Research in the News and on Social Media

Alperin

Fleerackers

Riedlinger

et al. 2023

Preprint

Self Cite

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The potential to capture the societal impact of research has been a driving motivation for the use and development of altmetrics. Yet, to date, altmetrics have largely failed to deliver on this potential because the primary audience who cites research on social media has been shown to be academics themselves. In response, our study investigates an extension of traditional altmetric approaches that goes beyond capturing direct mentions of research on social media. Using research articles from the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate the value of measuring 'second-order citations,' or social media mentions of news coverage of research. We find that a sample of these citations, published by just five media outlets, were shared and engaged with on social media twice as much as the research articles themselves. Moreover, first-order and second-order citations circulated among Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts that were largely distinct from each other. The differences in audiences and engagement patterns found in this case study highlight the importance of news coverage as a public source of science information and provide strong evidence that investigating these second-order citations can be an effective way of observing non-academic audiences that engage with research content.

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Altmetric.com or PlumX: Does it matter?

Rasuli,

Nabavi

2024

Learned Publishing

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Altmetric.com and PlumX are two prominent tools for collecting alternative metrics data. This study has two main objectives: first, to evaluate how the choice between Altmetric.com and PlumX affects the results of alternative metrics analysis, and second, to investigate the social impact of ‘hot papers’ through the alternative metrics data provided by these platforms. We employed a descriptive and exploratory approach, gathering common alternative metrics from 4236 hot papers using both Altmetric.com and PlumX. The data collected included various alternative metrics such as policy mentions, Mendeley readers, Wikipedia mentions, blog mentions, Facebook mentions, and news mentions, in addition to citation counts from Scopus. We conducted descriptive statistics and inferential analyses to examine the relationships between citations and alternative metrics, as well as to compare the data obtained from both platforms. Our findings indicate that PlumX has broader coverage of hot papers compared to Altmetric.com. While the mean and individual values of alternative metrics differ between the two platforms, the median and geometric mean are similar. Both Altmetric.com and PlumX demonstrate that publications with higher citation counts tend to receive more online attention. Notably, all alternative metrics for Immunology and Chemistry showed statistically significant differences between the two platforms, whereas in Mathematics, alternative metrics (with the exception of Mendeley readers) did not exhibit significant differences. The findings suggest that researchers should be aware of potential variations in data captured by different alternative metrics platforms. Additionally, interpreting alternative metrics data requires caution, considering the research fields and the specific platform used.

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Identifying science in the news: An assessment of the precision and recall of Altmetric.com news mention data

Cited by 15 publications

References 45 publications

Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Access research

Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Access research

Second-order Citations in Altmetrics: A Case Study Analyzing the Audiences of COVID-19 Research in the News and on Social Media

Altmetric.com or PlumX: Does it matter?

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