Exploring Indicators of Public Attention to Scholarly Documents in the Context of Environment-Related Research
Abstract
For more than a decade, altmetrics indicators – metrics of attention to scholarly documents based on their traces in digital environments, such as social media – have been heralded as potential metrics of the societal impact of research, contributing to creating a whole new area for research evaluation. Their development occurred at a time of technological advancement for digital tools and medias, as well as increasing pressure by various stakeholders to focus on the social dimensions of research. However, recent research on altmetrics and the societal impact of research, focusing mostly on the case of Twitter, highlighted the necessity to go beyond metrics and better assess the contexts in which documents circulate in digital environments. In this talk, I will present the work done during my article-based thesis on the circulation of climate change research documents on Twitter. Using a mixed-method methodological strategy, I explored the use of altmetric indicators to capture public attention to research by specifically looking at users sharing documents, how they engage to each other and how they relate to the documents they share. Through this approach, I propose to understand altmetrics indicators as traces of the resonance of scholarly documents in the public sphere. Concluding the talk, I will also present my current postdoctoral project aiming to compare scholarly and public attention toward marine conservation research.
