The Context
The InfluScience platform has just been published, a space to visualise scientists whose research has a greater presence in digital social media according to the principles of Altmetrics. The platform is one of the main results of the project InfluScience – Socially Influential Scientists: a model for measuring knowledge transfer in the digital society – PID2019-109127RB-I00; a National Plan project funded by the State Research Agency of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, whose principal researchers are Daniel Torres-Salinas and Esteban Romero from the University of Granada.
The general objective of the InfluScience platform is to provide an overview of the visibility and attention received by Spanish scientific publications in different media and social platforms and, in this way, to quantify their digital influence by means of altmetric indicators. More specifically, we measure social influence (measured through mentions on Twitter), political influence (through mentions in reports), media influence (through appearances in the news) and educational influence (through mentions in Wikipedia).
The Platform
The InfluScience platform shows the most prominent researchers and scientific articles on platforms and social networks during the five-year period 2016-2020. In total we can find the profiles of 4,209 Spanish researchers and 4,697 articles ranked, in both cases, by an indicator called Influratio. The results are also presented broken down by 22 different scientific fields. In each of them, the 250 most outstanding scientists or articles are shown.
In order to carry out this ranking of the digital influence of Spanish science, a large amount of information has been processed. A total of 434,827 articles published by national scientists in the Web of Science database were analysed. Altmetric.com was used to analyse their impact on social networks. A total of 3,596,296 mentions of Spanish publications were found, for example, of these 3,183,505 correspond to mentions on Twitter and 11,152 or 200,772 to mentions in the digital press.
The Results
Considering the overall ranking, the centres with the highest number of influential researchers are those linked to biomedical activity, such as the Institute of Health Carlos III and the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL), which have 20 and 14 researchers. Catalan universities have the most influential professors, especially the Universitat de Barcelona and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra with 17 and 9 respectively. At the article level, the ranking is led by three papers on COVID. For example, the article with the greatest digital impact on the InfluScience platform is «Remdesivir for the Treatment of Covid-19-Final Report», which has received 13,599 mentions on Twitter, 1,499 mentions in the press and 20 in agency reports.
More information
Rankings InfluScience: https://ranking.influscience.eu/
Contact
Daniel Torres Salinas – University of Granada – torressalinas@ugr.es
Esteban Romero Frías – University of Granada – erf@ugr.es