Measuring Attention In Science And Technology

Most people alive today who are not in science or medicine will not be able to quickly recall just ten biologists or ten chemists and their discoveries. Most of them can have a happy life without that knowledge. But may will easily recall ten popular sports people, singers, actors, and even the members of the Kardashian family. Some will recall celebrity scientists from the past including Einstein, Newton, Tesla. Celebrity scientists nowadays are very rare. In this long article I would like to explore some of the reasons why there is a lack of celebrity scientists, why do we need more of them, and how to track the popularity of academic papers.

Why Would You Want to Become Popular as a Scientist?

Have you ever heard someone being told that they have a memory like a goldfish? Ever wondered what this expression even means? It means that they tend to forget something rather quickly or that they have a short memory span. But the truth is that this expression is a myth. Goldfish do not have a 3-second memory span like we often hear. At least not according to this article by Live Science, which claims that some goldfish have a memory span of 2 seconds and others, 10 seconds – but it’s always short. But humans are not goldfish. We have a capacity to retain various types of information for different lengths of time. Short-term memories last seconds to hours, while long-term memories last for many years. According to this article by National Geographic, we also have a working memory that allows us to keep something in our minds for a limited time by repeating it. Whenever you read an academic article over and over again to memorize it, you’re using your working memory. Another way to categorize memories is by the subject of the memory itself. You tend to remember things you most deeply and passionately care about. Everyone cares about different things and so they retain information differently. I believe the most important type of information that we must retain is in scientific knowledge and discoveries. It is sometimes frustrating to see people forget about some of the most famous modern-day scientists in the world while choosing to remember certain celebrities who are famous for being famous.

For example, you may constantly hear about the Kardashians on the news or on social media, but when was the last time you heard about Rosalind Franklin? Or John Ray? Or John Logie Baird? Rosalind’s work was instrumental in the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA; John Ray published important works on botany, zoology, and natural theology; and John Baird demonstrated the world’s first live working television system. The work done by the former two is crucial to our understanding of humans, whereas the invention of the latter is something that we rely on to spread information. The truth is that while there’s nothing wrong with seeing celebrities dominating the news cycle in today’s day and age, we must also not forget those who have contributed so much to science.

It was not until Elon Musk entered the game and started promoting hardcore science in the consumer space that made him into the first celebrity-scientist-entrepreneur that smart kids put on their walls as a role model. Still, very few people know about Elon’s early successes like Zip2 and X.com. Even today, most people know about Elon because of SpaceX and Tesla. Neil deGrasse Tyson, a highly accomplished astrophysicist, gained more attention after he popularized science with such books as The Pluto Files and through his frequent appearances on television. Bill Nye had to host the science television show Bill Nye the Science Guy and the Netflix show Bill Nye Saves the World to get famous. Few people know about his career as a mechanical engineer for Boeing. Fewer know about his many patents.

When it comes to companies, DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet that builds advanced AI, managed to achieve greatness and fame by combining science with carefully-crafted PR. In 2017, DeepMind released a documentary called AlphaGo: The Movie, which helped inspire a generation of scientists as well as the general public. The documentary is about a five-game Go match between world champion Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, a computer program that combines advanced search tree with deep neural networks. These neural networks take a description of the Go board as an input and processes it through a number of different network layers containing millions of neuron-like connections (Spoiler alert: The AI wins). Not only did the documentary receive multiple awards and nominations, but it also inspired people to work on AI.

Altmetric – the Ultimate Tracker of Public Attention to Research

Very often, we see truly amazing scientific achievements published in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, or on pre-print servers. These are largely ignored by the mainstream public. To help measure attention beyond academia, Nature Publishing Group adopted a score called Altmetric.

According to its website, Altmetric are metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. They can include peer reviews on Faculty of 1000, citations on Wikipedia and in public policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream media coverage, bookmarks on reference managers like Mendeley, and mentions on social networks such as Twitter. Sourced from the internet, Altmetric can tell about how often journal articles and other scholarly outputs like datasets are discussed and used around the world. Altmetric has been incorporated into researchers’ websites, institutional repositories, journal websites, and more.

Here’s How Altmetric Works

In order to track online attention for a specific piece of research, Altmetric requires the following three things: An output (journal, article, dataset, etc), an identifier attached to the output (DOI, RePEc, etc), and mentions in a source that it tracks.

Once it tracks a mention of the research, Altmetric collates it together with any other online attention it has seen for that item. It then displays it via the Altmetric details page, along with its unique donut and automatically calculated Altmetric Attention Score. Altmetric also includes the technological capacity to track items according to their unique Unform Research Identifier. So far, Altmetric has worked with institutions, funders, think-tanks and publishers to track attention to their press releases, grey literature and company reports.

The Nature Index is another great database of author affiliations and institutional relationships. It tracks roughly 60,000 research articles per year from 82 high-quality natural science journals and provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level. The Nature Index was conceived by Nature Research, one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journals. In total, more than 10,000 institutions are listed in the Nature Index.

Here’s how the Nature Index works.

According to its website, the Nature Index uses article count (called Count) and fractional count (called Share) to track research output. A country/region or an institution is given a Count of 1 for each article that has at least one author from that country/region or institution. This is the case regardless of the number of authors an article has, and it means that the same article can contribute to the Count of multiple countries/regions or institutions.

To look at a country’s, a region’s or an institution’s contribution to an article, and to ensure they are not counted more than once, the Nature Index uses a fractional count, referred to as Share, which takes into account the share of authorship on each article. The total Share available per article is 1, which is distributed among all authors under the assumption that each contributed equally. For instance, an article with 10 authors means that each author receives a Share of 0.1. For authors who are affiliated with more than one institution, the author’s Share is then split equally between each institution. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors. The process is similar for countries/regions.

Other publishers have tried to copy their model but Altmetric remains the de-facto standard. And some of the concepts of Altmetric are integrated into many other places. For example, at Insilico Medicine in PandaOmics we track the industry’s attention to protein target using a tool called TargetMetric, which also presents a flower composed of the various sources of attention. It looks like Altmetric inspired many companies to represent attention in the flower format.

While very often more conservative scientists criticize scientific PR and optimization of the papers for higher Altmetric and often sensational nature of the announcements that help achieve higher Altmetric Attention Scores, it is extremely important to understand that the kids who are growing up today live in a new world of technology that is optimized to grab their attention and compete for their eyeballs. So it is important to compete not with the other scientists but with non-value-adding celebrities and noise and get the attention back into the real world of science. Like I said in the beginning of this article, humans are not goldfish; we have a capacity to retain various types of information for different lengths of time. We should use this capacity to learn more about science and the minds behind recent scientific developments.

Meet Katherine Christian – The Queen of Altmetric

Since inception Altmetric fascinated me. I think that it is our duty as scientists to popularize the scientific achievements of our own teams and the achievements of others and inspire the people to get into biomedicine. Tracking attention for scientific papers is not an easy task and Nature did not disappoint. Other publishers tried to launch similar systems that pale in comparison in terms of the quality, scale, and presentation. Hence, I was very pleased when Katherine Christian, CEO of Altmetric, agreed to answer a couple of my questions.

Alex: In your opinion, what the scientists can do to increase the popularity of their articles?

Kathy Christian: We don’t advocate increasing the popularity of research simply to increase the Altmetric Attention Score. When it comes to research attention, we encourage researchers to think about the aim of their research – what outcomes are they looking for – and to focus on the specific attention sources (e.g. policy, news, twitter) that are going to be most helpful in achieving those outcomes. For example, a researcher working on new ways for governments to reduce carbon emissions is most likely going to focus on attention in policy documents, whereas a researcher working on effective management of diabetes may be more focused on twitter and facebook with the aim of reaching patients. One tip we suggest is to search for research in your field that has been successful in reaching the audiences that you’re keen to reach and review their attention profile to help develop your communication strategy. For some more detailed tips we have a blog posts on this topic, ‘A quick and dirty guide to building your online reputation’ and a short guide; ‘10 clever tips for promoting your research online’ .

Alex: Are you planning to add any additional sources to Altmetric including TikTok and other social media? It looks like these channels are picking up in popularity.

Kathy Christian: We are continually evaluating where people are speaking about research in an effort to increase the diversity and coverage of our data; some attention sources are more challenging to track as they either do not link back to research or the platforms are closed. TikTok is a good example of an emerging source for research discussion that is also difficult to track. The technology required to detect mentions within a purely audiovisual space, such as TikTok, is still in its early stages, so collecting attention with a high enough level of confidence would be incredibly challenging. While YouTube is also an audiovisual space, in that case we’re able to rely on the ‘description’ section and search for links back to research outputs.

What Research Papers Get the Most Public Attention?

To highlight the most popular research papers, every year Altmetric publishes the Top 100 lists. There is a blog post, press release, and a podcast accompanying the annual release. And if you want to analyze the trends by yourself, there is also an open ready-to-crunch dataset.

Unsurprisingly, 2020 list was dominated by the COVID-19 papers. But if you look deeper at the most popular papers, these are either the papers written by celebrities, or papers covering popular dinner-table topics such as diet, fake news, and climate change. The exciting biology and chemistry papers are generally lagging behind.