Popular Research Articles of 2015

December 14, 2015 7:58 AM

Altmetric's top 100 academic research articles of 2015. These are the articles that captured the most attention from the mainstream media, blogs, Wikipedia, and social networks this year, according to Altmetric.
posted by painquale (11 comments total)

Looks like Metafilter and Hacker News have covered most of these. This one is new to me, though: "Photonic crystals cause active colour change in chameleons."

Here, combining microscopy, photometric videography and photonic band-gap modelling, we show that chameleons shift colour through active tuning of a lattice of guanine nanocrystals within a superficial thick layer of dermal iridophores. In addition, we show that a deeper population of iridophores with larger crystals reflects a substantial proportion of sunlight especially in the near-infrared range. The organization of iridophores into two superposed layers constitutes an evolutionary novelty for chameleons, which allows some species to combine efficient camouflage with spectacular display, while potentially providing passive thermal protection.

posted by Rangi at 8:41 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thanks. This doesn't take away from less "popular" research. Some good papers on this list.
posted by sety at 8:42 AM on December 14, 2015

Well, no risk of any of my papers being on this list...
posted by wintermind at 8:43 AM on December 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

This is interesting. I'm all for open access (and this report seems to indicate that open access leads to higher popular readership) but I doubt that many know that people often have to pay for open access. Big grants write in open access fees to the grant, but let's say that I do a $50,000 research project and get $30, 000 in funding and supplement the rest with gum and dental floss. How am I then also pay for open access? Those fees begin in the thousands.
Sure my field has a few subsidized open access journals and I do publish in them but they tend to be newer (thus less prestigious).

Anyway, off to create Twitter bots to tweet my research to make the 2016 list.
posted by k8t at 8:45 AM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I read the link, but didn't see a definitive answer-- does this include all articles published by all journals, or only articles published by institutions that pay for Altmetrics to aggregate their data?

I ask because Altmetrics is expensive. Trendy with the big publishing powerhouses, but $$$$ for nonprofits.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 8:48 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

The number of tweets is probably the most easily revealing statistic about 2,500 is the top end. For comparison, Justin Beiber tweeted the fragment "I love me a good" this week which as far as I can tell does not even make sense and still generated 70,000 retweets
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 8:55 AM on December 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

So you're saying my academic paper should aim first and foremost for a retweet by Justin Bieber?

I can already see it in my mind's eye:
"I love me a good scientific paper on Byzantine erotica."
posted by bigendian at 9:31 AM on December 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

Altmetric tracks anything with a DOI - you may have to pay to use the institutional interface, but not to be included in their searches. They measure the attention given to anything from papers on major publishers (even from journals not collaborating directly with Altmetric) to posters on FigShare. And anyone can download the free Altmetric bookmarklet from their site and check out the score on anything with a DOI.

Of course, the score is only based on attention that links back to the original paper - so if a newspaper piece on your research goes viral and people link to the newspaper rather than the scientific journal, that's not reflected in your Altmetric score.

However, a bot army will only do so much for you - Twitter mention give a fairly low score per mention (and only one mention per account counts), and they have some kind of capping algorithm in place as well.
posted by harujion at 9:52 AM on December 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

My most recent Open Access publication cost me about $1,800. Ugh.
posted by wintermind at 9:52 AM on December 14, 2015

Oh, and I should mention - Altmetric is a company. Altmetrics is the sort-of agreed-upon term for any "alternative metrics" that aren't traditional bibliometrics. So you can get altmetrics without using Altmetric (for instance how the PLOS journals will display page views and PDF download counts).
posted by harujion at 9:55 AM on December 14, 2015

"I love me a good scientific paper on Byzantine erotica."

I can't decide if you're a historian or a complexity theorist.
posted by biogeo at 1:25 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]