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| Andy Tattersall |
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| Chris Carroll |
Altmetrics offers all kinds of insights
into how a piece of research has been communicated and cited. In 2014
Altmetric.com added policy document tracking to its sources of
attention, offering another valuable insight into how research outputs
are used post-publication. At the University of Sheffield we thought it
would be useful to explore the Altmetric.com data for policy document
citations to see what impact our work is having on national and
international policy.
We analysed all published research from
authors at the University of Sheffield indexed in the Altmetric.com
database; a total of 96,550 research outputs, of which we were able to
identify 1,463 pieces of published research cited between one and 13
times in policy. This represented 0.65% of our research outputs. Of
these 1,463 artefacts, 21 were cited in five or more policy documents,
with the vast majority – 1,185 documents – having been cited just once.
Our sample compared very well with previous studies by Haunschild and Bornmann, who looked at papers indexed in Web of Science and found 0.5% were cited in policy, and Bornmann, Haunschild and Marx,
who found 1.2% of climate change research publications with at least
one policy mention. From our sample we found 92 research articles cited
in three or more policy documents. Of those 92 we found medicine,
dentistry, and health had the greatest policy impact, followed by social
science and pure science.
We also wanted to explore whether research
published by the University of Sheffield had a limited time span
between publication and policy citation. We looked at the time lag and
found it ranged from just three months to 31 years. This highlighted a
long tail of publications influencing policy, something we would have
struggled to identify prior to Altmetric.com without manual trawling.
The earliest piece of research from our sample to be cited in policy was
published in 1979 and took until 2010 before receiving its first policy
citation. We manually checked the records as we found many pre-1979
publications to have been published much later, often this century. This
is likely due to misreported data in the institutional dataset, giving a
false date; highlighting the need to manually check such records for
authenticity. The shortest time between research publication and policy
citation was a mere three months: a paper published in November 2016 and
first cited in National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)
policy in January 2017.
The Altmetric.com reports are only as good
as the data they analyse and our research did uncover some errors.
Looking at those 21 papers with more than five policy document
citations, we found seven were not fit for inclusion. One such example
was identified when we discovered research papers had been attributed to
the University of Sheffield when the authors were not, in fact,
affiliated to the university. As this data is sourced from our research
publications system, we assume this was a mistake made by the author;
this can happen when authors incorrectly accept as their own papers
suggested to them by the system. While this was almost certainly a
genuine error, and may have been rectified later, the system had not yet
updated to take account of such corrections. Another of these papers
was mistakenly attributed to an author who had no direct involvement in
the paper but who was part of a related wider research project. Another
of the publications was excluded due to it not, in fact, having actually
been cited in the relevant policy document. One of the papers that was
included belonged to an author not at Sheffield at the time of
publication, but who has since joined the institution. This showed that
Altmetric.com’s regular updates were able to discover updated
institutional information and realign authors with their current
employer.
The two most cited papers came from our
own department, the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR), in
the field of health economics. Only two of the 14 most cited
publications were in a field other than health economics or pure
economics, both of which were in environmental studies. In total, the 14
most cited research outputs were cited by 175 policy documents, but we
identified 9% (16) of these as duplicates. Of those 175 citations we
found that 61% (107) were national, i.e. from the UK, and 39% (68) were
international, i.e. from countries other than the UK or from
international bodies such as the United Nations or World Health
Organization.
Altmetric.com continues to add further
policy sources to its database to trawl for citations. As a result, it
should follow that our sample of 1,463 research outputs will not only
grow with more fresh policy citations, but as older research citations
are identified through new policy sources of attention. This work also
highlights the importance of research outputs having unique identifiers
so they can be tracked through altmetric platforms; it is certain that
more of our research will be cited in policy, but if no unique
identifier is attached, especially to older outputs, it is unlikely the
Altmetric.com system will pick it up.
Altmetric.com is a very useful indicator
of interest in and influence of research within global policy. Yet there
are clearly problems with the quality of the data and how it is
attributed to subsequent Altmetric.com data. We found one third of our
sample of the 21 most cited research outputs had been erroneously
attributed to an institution or author. Whether this is representative
of the whole dataset only further studies will find out. Therefore it is
essential that any future explorations of research outputs and policy
document citations be double-checked and not taken on face value.
This blog post is based on the authors’ article, “What
Can Altmetric.com Tell Us About Policy Citations of Research? An
Analysis of Altmetric.com Data for Research Articles from the University
of Sheffield”, published in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (DOI: 10.3389/frma.2017.00009).
The blog post was originally written for the LSE Impact Blog and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License unless otherwise stated. The original article appears here
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