Abstract
The social sciences, arts and humanities all address issues of general interest that may generate broad societal impacts and public discussion. Although prior research suggests that this potential is not captured by altmetrics, it is not known whether this is true for all fields. In response, this article compares 35 social sciences, arts and humanities fields for 10 Altmetric.com scores (blogs, news, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest, Wikipedia, reviews, questions, Google Plus) for articles published in 2013. Excluding Twitter (maximum 41%), no field had more than 12% of its articles registering a non-zero score on any altmetric five years after publication. In some cases, fields with relatively high levels of attention were due to self-publicity or the activities of individuals rather than public discussion. There were substantial differences between fields, with Classics and Literature & Literary Theory being almost ignored and Archeology generating a relatively high level of attention on Facebook. Although journal articles are not central to many social sciences, arts and humanities fields, the apparently universally low levels of discussion about them online is surprising given their potential audience.
Highlights
Researchers in some countries need to demonstrate the societal impact of their research (Wilsdon et al 2015), despite this being impossible to directly measure
Results citation counts for journal articles are low in the arts and humanities, in all fields they were more common than the commonest altmetric, Tweeters (Table 1)
The rest of the results focus on the proportion of articles with a non-zero altmetric score
Summary
Researchers in some countries need to demonstrate the societal impact of their research (Wilsdon et al 2015), despite this being impossible to directly measure. Evidence of societal impact is especially needed in the arts and humanities because these often claim to address the cultural needs of wide sections of the public (McCarthy et al 2001; Nussbaum 2010). The social sciences underpin many numerically large professions as well as generating public interest for insights into the human condition and may expect to have a large non-academic audience (Lynd 2015). It seems reasonable to expect that some specialization in these areas might generate substantial interest online. This article investigates the social sciences, arts and humanities together as relatively neglected areas even though they encompass widely varying research topics and practices (e.g. from Visual Arts & Performing Arts to Public Administration)
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