Abstract
The rapid growth of online tools to communicate scientific research raises the important question of whether online attention is associated with citations in the scholarly literature. The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) quantifies the attention received by a scientific publication on various online platforms including news, blogs and social media. It has been advanced as a rapid way of gauging the impact of a piece of research, both in terms of potential future scholarly citations and wider online engagement. Here, we explore variation in the AAS of 2677 research articles published in 10 ornithological journals between 2012 and 2016. On average, AAS increased sevenfold in just five years, primarily due to increased activity on Twitter which contributed 75% of the total score. For a subset of 878 articles published in 2014, including an additional 323 ornithology articles from non-specialist journals, an increase in AAS from 1 to 20 resulted in a predicted 112% increase in citation count from 2.6 to 5.5 citations per article. This effect interacted with journal impact factor, with weaker effects of AAS in higher impact factor journals. Our results suggest that altmetrics (or the online activity they measure), as well as complementing traditional measures of scholarly impact in ornithology such as citations, may also anticipate or even drive them.
Highlights
Whatever the motivation for publishing scientific research, articles should be discovered and read by some target audience
The highest mean score was 14.7 (The Auk) and the lowest 4.0 (Emu). This variation is associated with journal impact factor, with articles published in higher impact factor journals (The Auk, Ibis and Journal of Avian Biology) tending to receive more attention on average
We found a correlation between Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) and citation count; moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of AAS increased citation count by 112% for articles published in journals with the median impact factor
Summary
Whatever the motivation for publishing scientific research, articles should be discovered and read by some target audience. In the Internet age, the mode of publishing, sharing, finding and reading scientific research is evolving [1,2,3]. Online media channels, including blogging sites and the mass social media networks. Such as Twitter, have fast become important communication channels for scientists to generate and 2 discuss ideas, find collaborators and disseminate research both within their own communities and to the general public [4]. Various stakeholders (e.g. policy-makers and funders) are active on—or paying increasing attention to—social media, broadening the potential impact of activity on these platforms
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