Deconstructing the Donut

Aim: We were curious to find out what drives high Altmetric attention scores. Is it Twitter, news, Facebook or blogs? Discovering the drivers of exceptionally high Altmetric scores allows us to provide researchers with useful advice on how to best engage with social media and extend their research reach.

The Altmetric Attention Score is a composite index that indicates the attention a research publication receives across a range of platforms, including mentions in mainstream news and on Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and blogs. The final score is weighted based on the relative impact and reach of each platform.

Methods: We analysed the data from Altmetric.com for the full body of publications (n = 34,034) at the University of Tasmania to identify notable publications of different types of social media to outputs that received a high degree of attention. Linear regression was used to identify the social media types that correlated most strongly with final Altmetric Attention Scores, and Cook's distances were used to identify outliers that indicated disproportionate component influences.

Results: Cook's distances to regression fits indicated that the top four UTAS publications listed by Altmetric.com were outliers with respect to certain contributing social media outlets to the final Altmetric scores. This suggests that the best UTAS publications achieved their Altmetric Attention Scores in a different way than to the average UTAS publication.

Discussion and Recommendations:

News is heavy. News mentions strongly correlate with overall Altmetrics attention scores and have high impact. Authors should engage with news media wherever possible and contact institutional press offices to check for publicity opportunities.

Tweets are sweet. Twitter mentions have a moderate correlation with overall Altmetrics scores but are a simple way to increase exposure. Create and use a diverse Twitter network and ask societies and institutional press offices to tweet papers.

Blogs can bite. Although blog mentions have only a modest correlation with overall Altmetrics scores, individual scores can have high impact. Authors should post and moderate blogs within their fields.