The top 100 most-discussed journal articles of 2018

This article is part 1 of a series reviewing selected papers from Altmetric’s list of the top 100 most-discussed journal articles of 2018.

As we’ve done in previous years, we once again take an end-of-year look at the open access papers related to knowledge management from Altmetric’s list of the top 100 most-mentioned scholarly articles published through the year.

Altmetric has published the top 100 list since 2013, and in November published a blog post revealing key insights from the five years of top 100 lists between 2013 and 2017. These insights include:

• Most of the research in the Top 100 lists to date has been authored by researchers from institutions in the US and UK. While Altmetric advises that this is partly due to the availability of data and the high volume of mentions from western social media sources, I suggest that this bias is largely associated with the global knowledge imbalance that I’ve discussed in a previous RealKM Magazine article.

• Altmetric expected that the number of titles published open access would increase steadily over time, reflecting the increasing shift to open access. However, there’s been no significant increase, with around 30 – 40 open access articles featuring in each year’s list. This is very disappointing, and highlights a need for more action in support of open access by authors, publishers, and research funders.

In 2018, Altmetric tracked over 25 million mentions of 2.8 million research outputs to prepare the top 100 list. The open access papers related to knowledge management from the 2018 list are:

• #13 The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration

• #18 Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate

• #38 Scientists on Twitter: Preaching to the choir or singing from the rooftops?

• #44 A study exploring the impact of lecture capture availability and lecture capture usage on student attendance and attainment

• #61 Man against machine: diagnostic performance of a deep learning convolutional neural network in comparison to 58 dermatologists

• #68 Many Analysts, One Data Set: Making Transparent How Variations in Analytic Choices Affect Results

• #73 Sugar industry sponsorship of germ-free rodent studies: An historical analysis of internal documents.

Also published on Medium.