Why are medical research articles tweeted? The news value perspective

Counts of tweets mentioning research articles are potentially useful as social impact altmetric indicators, especially for health-related topics. One way to help understand what tweet counts indicate is to find factors that associate with the number of tweets received by articles. Using news value theory, this study examined six characteristics of research papers that may cause some articles to be more tweeted than others. For this, we manually coded 300 medical journal articles about COVID-19. A statistical analysis showed that all six factors that make articles more newsworthy according to news value theory (importance, controversy, elite nations, elite persons, scale, news prominence) associated with higher tweet counts. Since these factors are hypothesised to be general human news selection criteria, the results give new evidence that tweet counts may be indicators of general interest to members of society rather than measures of societal impact. This study also provides a new understanding of the strong positive relationship between news mentions and tweet counts for articles. Instead of news coverage attracting tweets or the other way round (journalists noticing highly tweeted articles and writing about them), the results are consistent with newsworthy characteristics of articles attracting both tweets and news mentions.

A systematic method for identifying references to academic research in grey literature

Grey literature encompasses documents not published in academic journals or books. Some grey literature has substantial societal importance, such as medical guidelines, government analyses and pressure group reports. Academic research cited in such documents may therefore have had indirect societal impact, such as in policy making, clinical practice or legislation. Identifying citations to academic research from grey literature may therefore help assess its societal impacts. This is difficult, however, due to the variety of document and referencing formats used in grey literature, even from a single organisation. In response, this study introduces and tests a semi-automatic method to match academic journal articles with unstandardised grey literature cited references. For this, the metadata (lead author last name, title, year) of 2.45 million UK Russell Group university outputs was matched against a 100-document sample of UK government grey literature to assess the accuracy of 21 matching heuristics. The optimal method (lead author last name and title in either order, maximum of 200 characters apart) is sufficiently accurate and scalable to make the task of matching research outputs to grey literature references feasible. The method was then applied to 3347 government publications, showing approximately 23% of UK government grey literature in this study contained at least one reference to UK Russell Group university output, and of this grey literature, an average of 3.79 references were present per document. The applied method also shows that economics and environmental science academic research is most cited between 2010 and 2018.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-022-04408-4.

Which aspects of the Open Science agenda are most relevant to scientometric research and publishing? An opinion paper

Open Science is an umbrella term that encompasses many recommendations for possible changes in research practices, management, and publishing with the objective to increase transparency and accessibility. This has become an important science policy issue that all disciplines should consider. Many Open Science recommendations may be valuable for the further development of research and publishing, but not all are relevant to all fields. This opinion paper considers the aspects of Open Science that are most relevant for scientometricians, discussing how they can be usefully applied.