CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – In a review of the scholarly research that captured the most public attention online this year, three of the top 100 articles had authors from the University of Illinois.
The top U. of I. research story was an analysis showing hurricanes with female names are deadlier than those with male names. The story, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, was number 29 in the Altmetric Top 100 of 2014.
Altmetric is a London-based company that measures how much attention a scholarly article receives online from newspapers, blogs, social media sites, government policy documents, peer-review forums and other sources. The company gives a qualitative score to articles, based on volume of mentions, the sources (for example, newspaper stories count more than blog posts, which count more than tweets), and the author of the mention (for example, a mention by an expert counts more than a mention by a journal pushing links to its articles).
The other U. of I. research stories in the Top 100 were research on sexual harassment and abuse of scientists doing fieldwork (number 38) and DNA analysis that sheds light on the first people to inhabit the Americas (number 91).
All three of the stories with U. of I. authors were among the top 5 percent of stories from their particular journals in terms of attention. The story on hurricane names was mentioned by 77 news outlets and in 596 tweets, 24 blog posts and 24 Facebook posts.
The story on sexual harassment of scientists in the field was published in the journal PLOS ONE. It was mentioned by 34 news outlets and in 934 tweets, 46 Facebook posts and 39 blog posts.
The story on the origins of the first Americans was published in the journal Science. It was mentioned by 68 news outlets and in 132 tweets.
The top-ranking scholarly story of 2014 was research that manipulated what Facebook users saw in their news feeds in order to study how it would affect their moods.
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