Field- and time-normalization of data with many zeros: an empirical analysis using citation and Twitter data

Evaluating the perceptions of pesticide use, safety, and regulation and identifying common pesticide-related topics on Twitter

Synthetic pesticides are important agricultural tools that increase crop yield and help feed the world's growing population. These products are also highly regulated to balance benefits and potential environmental and human risks. Public perception of pesticide use, safety, and regulation is an important topic necessitating discussion across a variety of stakeholders from lay consumers to regulatory agencies since attitudes toward this subject could differ markedly. Individuals and organizations can perceive the same message(s) about pesticides differently due to prior differences in technical knowledge, perceptions, attitudes, and individual or group circumstances. Social media platforms, like Twitter, include both individuals and organizations and function as a townhall where each group promotes their topics of interest, shares their perspectives, and engages in both well-informed and misinformed discussions. We analyzed public Twitter posts about pesticides by user group, time, and location to understand their communication behaviors, including their sentiments and discussion topics, using machine learning-based text analysis methods. We extracted tweets related to pesticides between 2013 and 2021 based on relevant keywords developed through a "snowball" sampling process. Each tweet was grouped into individual versus organizational groups, then further categorized into media, government, industry, academia, and three types of nongovernmental organizations. We compared topic distributions within and between those groups using topic modeling and then applied sentiment analysis to understand the public's attitudes toward pesticide safety and regulation. Individual accounts expressed concerns about health and environmental risks, while industry and government accounts focused on agricultural usage and regulations. Public perceptions are heavily skewed toward negative sentiments, although this varies geographically. Our findings can help managers and decision-makers understand public sentiments, priorities, and perceptions and provide insights into public discourse on pesticides. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2023;19:1581-1599. © 2023 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).

Recent trends in the use of social media in parasitology and the application of alternative metrics

In recent times, the use of social media for the dissemination of “news and views” in parasitology has increased in popularity. News, Twitter and Blogs have emerged as commonplace vehicles in the knowledge dissemination and transfer process. Alternative metrics (“altmetrics”), based on social media mentions have been proposed as a measure of societal impact, although firm evidence for this relationship is yet to be found. Nevertheless, increasing amounts of data on “altmetrics” are being analysed to identify the nature of the unknown impact that social media is generating. Here, we examine the recent, and increasing use of social media in the field of parasitology and the relationship of “altmetrics” with more traditional bibliometric indicators, such as article citations and journal metrics. The analyses document the rise and dominance of Twitter as the main form of social media occurring in the discipline of parasitology and note the contribution to this trend of Twitter bots that automatically tweet about publications. We also report on the use of the social referencing platform Mendeley and its correlation to article citations; Mendeley reader numbers are now considered to provide firm evidence on the early impact of research. Finally, we consider the Twitter profile of 31 journals publishing parasitology research articles (by volume of papers published); we show that 13 journals are associated with prolific Twitter activity about parasitology. We hope this study will stimulate not only the continued and responsible use of social media to disseminate knowledge about parasitology for the greater good, but also encourage others to further investigate the impact and benefits that altmetrics may bring to this discipline.

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We highlight and document the rise of social media and its use in parasitology.

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Twitter activity within the parasitology community has increased significantly over the last 10 years.

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Mendeley reader activity is strongly correlated with an article's citations.

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Thirteen journals are associated with prolific Twitter activity about parasitology.

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A Journalʼs social media strategy is important to authors.

Identifying and characterizing social media communities: a socio-semantic network approach to altmetrics

Altmetric indicators allow exploring and profiling individuals who discuss and share scientific literature in social media. But it is still a challenge to identify and characterize communities based on the research topics in which they are interested as social and geographic proximity also influence interactions. This paper proposes a new method which profiles social media users based on their interest on research topics using altmetric data. Social media users are clustered based on the topics related to the research publications they share in social media. This allows removing linkages which respond to social or personal proximity and identifying disconnected users who may have similar research interests. We test this method for users tweeting publications from the fields of Information Science & Library Science, and Microbiology. We conclude by discussing the potential application of this method and how it can assist information professionals, policy managers and academics to understand and identify the main actors discussing research literature in social media.

The online attention to orthodontic research: an Altmetric analysis of the orthodontic journals indexed in the journal citation reports from 2014 to 2018

BACKGROUND

To describe the impact of research, beyond the limits of the academic environment, Altmetric, a new social and traditional media metric was proposed. The aims of this study were to analyze the online activity related to orthodontic research via Altmetric and to assess if a correlation exists among citations, Mendeley reader count, and the AAS (Altmetric Attention Score).

METHOD

The Dimensions App was searched for articles published in the orthodontic journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) throughout the years 2014 to 2018. The articles with a positive AAS were collected and screened for data related to publication and authorship. The articles with an AAS higher than 5 were screened for research topic and study design. Citation counts were harvested from Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus.

RESULTS

The best performing journals were Progress in Orthodontics and the European Journal of Orthodontics with a mean AAS per published item of 1.455 and 1.351, respectively and the most prevalent sources were Tweets and Facebook mentions. The most prevalent topic was Oral Health-Related Quality of Life (OHRQOL) and the study design was systematic reviews. The correlation between the AAS and the citations in both WOS and Scopus was poor (r = 0.1463 and r = 0.1508, p < .05). The correlation between citations count and Mendeley reader (r = 0.6879 and r = 0.697, p < .05) was moderate.

CONCLUSIONS

Few journals displayed a high level of web activity. Journals and editors should enhance online dissemination of the scientific outputs. The authors should report the impact of the findings to the general public in a convenient way to facilitate online dissemination but to avoid an opportunistic use of the research outputs. Despite the lack of correlation, a combination of the citation count and the AAS can give a more comprehensive assessment of research impact.

Can altmetrics reflect societal impact considerations?: Exploring the potential of altmetrics in the context of a sustainability science research center

Societal impact considerations play an increasingly important role in research evaluation. In particular, in the context of publicly funded research, proposal templates commonly include sections to outline strategies for achieving broader impact. Both the assessment of the strategies and the later evaluation of their success are associated with challenges in their own right. Ever since their introduction, altmetrics have been discussed as a remedy for assessing the societal impact of research output. On the basis of data from a research center in Switzerland, this study explores their potential for this purpose. The study is based on the papers (and the corresponding metrics) published by about 200 either accepted or rejected applicants for funding by the Competence Center Environment and Sustainability (CCES). The results of the study seem to indicate that altmetrics are not suitable for reflecting the societal impact of research that was considered: The metrics do not correlate with the ex ante considerations of an expert panel.

Measuring the social impact of research in Paediatric Dentistry: An Altmetric study

BACKGROUND

Traditional metrics have been extensively used to evaluate the scientific performance. Despite being widespread accepted, citation-based metrics are not able to describe the social impact of research. A diverse metric, Altmetric, was proposed to overcome those limitations.

AIM

This study aims to analyse the social impact of research in the field of paediatric dentistry and to assess if a correlation exists between the JCR citations, the AAS score, and the recently released Dimensions citation count.

DESIGN

A bibliometric study was conducted on the four journals related to Paediatric Dentistry listed in the JCR from 2014 to 2017. Descriptive statistics was used to describe the articles and the journals. Pearson's correlation analysis was used to explore the relationship among JCR citations, AAS, and Dimensions.

RESULTS

The percentage of articles with an AAS presents a huge variability and was significantly higher in the International Journal of Paediatric Dentistry. In our sample, the correlation between the JCR citation count and the AAS was poor in the years 2014, 2015, and 2016 and low in 2017. The correlation between JCR citation and Dimensions citation count was strong.

CONCLUSIONS

The social impact of research in paediatric dentistry can be increased. Dimensions could be an alternative to the JCR. Both the editors and the researcher should change their vision and facilitate the access to research information to scholar and non-scholar audiences.

F1000Prime recommended articles and their citations: an exploratory study of four journals

This study examined F1000Prime recommended research and review articles published in Cell, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 2010. The analyses included (1) the classifications assigned to the articles; (2) differences in Web of Science (WoS) citation counts over 9 years between the articles with F1000Prime recommendations and the other articles of the same journal; (3) correlations between the F1000Prime rating scores and WoS citation counts; (4) scaled graphic comparisons of the two measures; (5) content analysis of the top 5 WoS cited and top 5 F1000Prime scored NEJM articles. The results show that most of the recommended articles were classified as New Finding, Clinical Trial, Conformation, Interesting Hypothesis, and Technical Advance. The top classifications differred between the medical journals (JAMA, The Lancet, and NEJM) and the biology journal (Cell); for the latter, both New Finding and Interesting Hypothesis occurred more frequently than the three medical journals. The articles recommended by F1000 Faculty members were cited significantly more than other articles of the same journal for the three medical journals, but no significance was found between the two sets of articles in Cell. The correlations between the F1000Prime rating scores and WoS citation counts of the articles in the same journal were significant for the two medical journals (The Lancet and NEJM) and the biology journal (Cell). NEJM showed significances in both the upper quantile (top 50%), and the upper quartile (top 25%) sets. One of the medical journals, JAMA, did not show any significant correlation between the two measures. Despite the significant correlations of the three journals, Min–Max scaled graphic comparisons of the two measures did not reveal any patterns for predicting citation trends by F1000Prime rating scores. The peak citation year of the articles ranged from 2 to 8 years after the publication year for NEJM. Content analysis of the top-cited and top-scored NEJM articles found that highly commendable papers with comments such as “exceptional,” “landmark study,” or “paradigm shift” received varied rating scores. In comparison, some of the results corroborate with previous studies. Further studies are suggested to include additional journals and different years as well as alternative methods. Studies are needed to understand how F1000 Faculty assign ratings and what criteria they use. In addition, it is also worth investigating how F1000Prime users perceive the meanings of the ratings.