Altmetric Are Now Tracking Online Attention in The Conversation

Today Altmetric announce they have begun to track the online attention surrounding articles published by The Conversation.

First launched in Australia in 2011, The Conversation aims to unlock the knowledge of experts and provide their insights direct to the public, ensuring editorial excellence to provide access to independent, high quality, authenticated, explanatory journalism. The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community, tapping into the expertise of more than 25,000 academics and researchers worldwide.

Visibility into the altmetrics data for their content, including where the articles are being shared, referenced and discussed in the mainstream news, social media, and on platforms such as Wikipedia and Mendeley, will help contributors and editors understand to what extent they are achieving their goals.

Since tracking began on September 16th 2015, Altmetric data shows that there have been over 35,000 mentions, including over 30,000 tweets and nearly 500 blogs, of over 2,000 pieces of content published in The Conversation – demonstrating the growing visibility and engagement that this innovative publication is driving.

How does it work?

Attention for research published in The Conversation is tracked based on the Unique Resource Identifier (in this case the URL) of each article, and can be found by filtering by publication name in the Altmetric Explorer and Altmetric for Institutions platforms – meaning that institutions using these tools can see and analyse the engagement data relating to articles written for The Conversation by their academics.

Lisa Watts, Chief Operating Officer at The Conversation, says,

“We launched this new form of publishing with the aim of breaking down the barriers to expert knowledge and opinion – to make it easier for academics to communicate their expertise to a more diverse audience. The attention data collated by Altmetric is invaluable in helping us monitor how the content we publish is being received and shared, and to identify new channels with which we should be engaging.”

Since early 2015, Altmetric have also tracked The Conversation as a source of research mentions – picking up references to other published academic content from articles published in The Conversation itself.

Altmetric Founder Euan Adie adds,

“In creating a platform for expert analysis to be more effectively communicated to a much wider readership than an academic journal would typically see, The Conversation are leading a groundbreaking approach in changing how the general public understand some of the biggest challenges and opportunities that our global society faces, now and in the future. We’re interested to see how the application of altmetrics might help them achieve this goal.”