What Happens When Science Journals Start Focusing on Pageviews?

Science research has gone social. An online analytics company just published a list of the top 100 most-shared academic research articles for the year, a fresh sign that research publications will join the ranks of the metrics obsessed.

The company behind the list, the United Kingdom’s Altmetric, says its tool measures Facebook likes, tweets, and Google+ shares that link directly to the journal article itself—and not, say, a news article about the study. The firm says this can help researchers “show [that] the impact of their papers, books, and datasets are beyond just having citations.”

Social media and Internet virality have, obviously, completely changed how the news media works. Could it do the same for academic publishing? It’s hard to say, but early indicators suggest that it might.

The list is a mix of high-impact science (including papers about radiation poisoning in fish living near the Fukushima nuclear disaster, brain-to-brain interfaces, and discoveries of early human fossils), self-help (the heart-health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet, the role exercise plays on early mortality), curios (studies relating to Sudoku, the makeup of a chicken nugget, the universality of the word “huh”), and studies seemingly ready-made for social sharing (Facebook use predicts a decline in “wellbeing,” poverty impedes cognitive function).

Even the most popular Altmetric journal articles of 2013 were only shared a couple thousand times across social media. The Fukushima one, which placed first, was only tweeted 8,300 times, a number that pales in comparison to even moderately popular Internet news stories.

The “impact” of a paper in a science journal has traditionally been measured in the number of times it is cited by other papers, and ones that make breakthroughs can be measured with their tangible effects on medicine, policy, or advancing commonly-held scientific beliefs.

News articles used to be measured in much the same way—a politician was forced to resign, corruption was exposed, awareness was brought to a certain subject. Those tenets are still important when it comes to prestige, and the most important articles still get lots of eyeballs, but prizes and impact often mean little when it comes down to a news organization’s bottom line. Could the same thing happen to science journals?

There is evidence that the industry is starting to rely more and more and social media to get its studies out there. In October, BMJ, one of the most important medical journals in the world, announced it would be putting Altmetrics information on each of its journal articles posted online.

“As a result of the increasing scholarly use of social tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Mendeley, there is a need to track scholarly impact on the social web by creating new filters,” Claire Bower, BMJ’s digital communications manager, wrote on the journal’s website. “As an author, you can measure the online impact of your research, and as a reader, you have quick and easy ways to see which papers are receiving the most attention.”

As anyone who follows the news will know, not every article that goes viral is well reported, important, or true. But once something gains social steam, there’s often little anyone can do to stop it.

Science journal articles, on the other hand, aren’t often eminently shareable. They’re generally long, technical walls of text that can be difficult for the layperson to immediately understand. It’s unclear whether there will ever be a truly “viral” scientific study, or if news articles based on the study will continue to rule the day.

Either way, it’s something that Altmetrics is working on, and is already something that many science journals are considering. Earlier this month, Nature announced that it had partnered with /r/science on Reddit to discuss its journal articles on the subreddit. Reddit has had a huge impact on the social sharing of journal articles themselves, as the moderators there prefer that people post direct links to journal articles or at least links to news articles that link to the original research.

I asked John Bohannon, a reporter at Science and the man behind a “sting” about the ease of getting a fake study published in open-access journals earlier this year, whether social media has the potential to change how scientists and science journals operate.

“The answer to this is an overwhelming YES and it’s already happening,” he said. “I can definitely say as a science reporter [at Science] that the editors spend a significant portion of their time monitoring social media. The mere fact that a scientific article or story gets a huge amount of attention in social media is often grounds for covering it as news. It’s just a very useful way of gauging public interest.”

But, as I mentioned earlier, news of new scientific findings spread via news stories about journal articles, not journal articles themselves. Jean Liu, data curator of Altmetric, says that the company is working on expanding its “score” to include shares of articles that reference a particular study.

“Whenever someone mentions a news report that points to a paper, that is what we call a ‘second-order citation.’ At present, Altmetric only counts mentions of the journal article itself,” she said. “Collecting all the possible second-order citations isn’t possible for us just yet, but it is definitely something that we are working on.”

It remains to be seen whether, like many news organization, science journals will start measuring the success of their studies based on whether the general public is reading them. Unlike most news sites, many small academic journals aren’t supported by advertising. But the biggest ones, like Nature, Science, and Cell, are. There’s also a definite benefit to having your studies being the most buzzed about. Who knows if social tools like Altmetric will lead top journals to start publishing more studies that value style over substance. But pageviews and Facebook likes are like a drug, and some journals are already treading in dangerous waters.