Impact of BMC Medicine articles in the news and social media - BioMed Central blog

"Today, as part of our 10 year anniversary, we take a look at a more contemporary measure of article level metrics in BMC Medicine, by looking at our top 10 articles as ranked by Altmetric.com. Altmetric quantifies the media response of an article over a variety of online platforms including news items, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and Reddit among others, to give a measure of the interest the article has received. This response is indicated via an Altmetric ‘donut’ which BioMed Central added to all published articles in May 2012. More information can be read in a previous blog. On publication we regularly tweet about our articles from our @BMCMedicine Twitter account and also encourage authors to share articles via their own social media profiles. We work closely with our Press Center in order to disseminate articles we feel are of broad public interest, and often write blogs on our articles where appropriate. As a journal, we find Altmetric scores very interesting, and follow them closely for each new article we publish. As a general medical journal, much of our content is of interest to patient groups, as well as researchers and medical practitioners, and so by following Altmetric data it is useful for us to see who is actively discussing our articles. In a Twitter chat we held last year, we found that generally, healthcare providers deem social media as an important tool for patients allowing them to feel more educated about a specific condition or treatment. See the list of our top 10 articles with highest Altmetric scores below. Click on the donut next to any of the articles to see the breakdown of the article’s social impact. A more colourful donut indicates that the article has been mentioned on a higher number of different media outlets. It must be noted that the Altmetric score does not necessarily indicate the quality of a study, but rather it acts as an indicator of social interest, and should be used as a supplement against other measures such as article accesses and citations as mentioned in our blogs earlier this week. Unsurprisingly, our top 10 list consists of studies published in the last two years. Altmetric does include studies published before this time, but the scores of articles published before July 2011 are less likely to be accurate. For each article that has been mentioned on Twitter, Altmetric provides a map with a breakdown of the geographical location of each tweet sent. For example, the fourth highest article on our list below, a research article on Open access versus subscription journals, generated substantial interest across the globe as indicated in the Altmetic diagram below. This allows authors to instantly see where in the world their article is being discussed, which until the introduction of measures such as Altmetric, was difficult to ascertain ..."