Altmetric Reveals Most-mentioned Articles of 2017

Altmetric, which tracks the kinds of usage of scholarly output described in NISO RP-25-2016, Outputs of the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics Project, has released its list of the top 100 most-discussed journal articles of 2017. The articles are ranked in order of their Altmetric Attention Score on November 15 of this year and are derived from a dataset that Altmetric has also made public on Figshare.

The list mostly includes life science articles, with many of them covering topics that journalists can be relied upon to cover annually, such the health effects of caffeine, chocolate, and alcohol. Other articles stand out as addressing subjects that were more specific to 2017, such as those describing the remains of a female Viking warrior and a feathered dinosaur.

Some information science articles did make the cut, however. These are:

• Grace, Katja & Salvatier, John & Dafoe, Allan & Zhang, Baobao & Evans, Owain. (2017). When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts. arXiv, May 2017.
• Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos. Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Vol. 2, Issue 2, 140-154.
• Primack, Brian A. et al. Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation Among Young Adults in the U.S. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Vol. 53, Issue 1, 1- 8.

The list provides a breakdown of how many times each article was mentioned and what kind of sources picked it up. The most tweeted article of the information science pieces mentioned above, for example, was When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?, which was tweeted 4,708 times as of November 15, 2017; it was also covered in 137 news stories and 24 Facebook posts, to list just some of the article’s mentions.