Outreach and Post-Publication Impact of Soil Erosion Modelling Literature

Nejc Bezak,Matjaž Mikoš,Pasquale Borrelli,Panos Panagos

doi:10.3390/su14031342

Abstract

Back in the 1930s, the aphorism “publish or perish” first appeared in an academic context. Today, this phrase is becoming a harsh reality in several academic environments, and scientists are giving increasing attention to publishing and disseminating their scientific work. Soil erosion modelers make no exception. With the introduction of the bibliometric field, the evaluation of the impact of a piece of scientific work becomes more articulated. The post-publication impact of the research became an important aspect too. In this study, we analyse the outreach and the impact of the literature on soil erosion modelling using the altmetric database, i.e., Altmetric. In our analysis, we use only a small fraction (around 15%) of Global Applications of Soil Erosion Modelling Tracker (GASEMT) papers because only 257 papers out of 1697 had an Altmetric Score (AS) larger than 0. We observed that media and policy documents mentioned more frequently literature dealing with global-scale assessments and future projection studies than local-scale ones. Papers that are frequently cited by researchers do not necessarily also yield high media and policy outreach. The GASEMT papers that had an AS larger than 0 were, on average, mentioned by one policy document and five Twitter users and had 100 Mendeley readers. Only around 5% and 9% of papers with AS > 0 appeared in news articles and blogs, respectively. However, this percentage was around 45% for Twitter and policy mentions. The top GASEMT paper’s upper bound was around 1 million Twitter followers, while this number was around 10,000 for the 10th ranked GASEMT paper. The exponentially increasing trend for erosion modelling papers having an AS has been confirmed, as during the last 3 years (2014–2017), we estimated that the number of entries had doubled compared to 2011–2014 and quadrupled if we compare it with 2008–2011.

Highlights

Introduction published maps and institutional affilLand use and management policies in the years and decades to come will need to better adapt to climate change and, inherently, be more effectively related to soil erosion, as soil degradation is a rising global threat to land, fresh waters, and oceans [1]
Almost 85% of records in the Global Applications of Soil Erosion Modelling Tracker (GASEMT) database have an Altmetric Score (AS) = 0. This finding already allows us to draw a first conclusion, which is that soil erosion modelling is not a topic of high interest for the general public
Using the GASEMT data, it was found that only 15% of records have an AS larger than

Summary

Introduction

Land use and management policies in the years and decades to come will need to better adapt to climate change and, inherently, be more effectively related to soil erosion, as soil degradation is a rising global threat to land, fresh waters, and oceans [1]. Sustainable land use and management policies need to take into account the extent and hotspots of soil erosion, for which today soil erosion modelling offers cost-effective assessments worldwide. There are many open challenges related to soil erosion and policy developments in Europe [5]. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) present challenges for integrating soil erosion modelling into policy [5]. There are still some open questions, such as: (a) are iations

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Conclusion