News


Obama research tops Altmetric rankings


Research by former US President Obama on healthcare reform was the most widely discussed and shared academic paper of 2016, resulting in the highest Altmetric Attention Score ever tracked. Obama’s paper on the progress of the Affordable Healthcare Act and recommendations for future governments, in the medical journal JAMA, also marked a first from a sitting president.


The annual Altmetric Top 100 highlights published research papers in 2016 that have generated significant international online attention and discussion – from mainstream news media, blogs, Wikipedia, social media platforms (including Twitter, Reddit & Facebook) and in scholarly spaces such as post-publication peer- review forums and patient advocacy groups.


The top 10 articles of 2016 were: l President Obama’s paper on the


progress achieved with the United States’ landmark healthcare legislation and lessons for future policy makers;


l Medical error is the third largest cause of death in the US;


l Phenomenon of two distant black holes colliding observed and celebrated;


l New giant planet may be lurking in our solar system;


l Sugar industry sponsored research to draw consumers’ attention away from sugar’s impact on coronary heart disease;


l Emergence of Zika and the resulting risk of microcephaly and brain damage to infants of affected mothers alarmed parents-to-be the world over;


l Your social status may have a direct impact on your life expectancy;


l Wearing a fitness tracker doesn’t appear to improve weight loss;


l Artificial intelligence beats human European Go champion for the first time; and


l One of the world’s astronomical wonders, the Milky Way, is invisible to 60 per cent of Europeans due to light pollution.


Many articles in the Top 100 feature contributions from a large number of authors, spread across different continents. Strength in US and mainland European collaborations is evidenced in the 49 papers featuring authors from those regions, while authors from Canada and Australia most often collaborated with peers in the US and Germany.


Figshare teams up with SpringerNature


Figshare, an online digital repository for academic research, has teamed up with Springer Nature to support BioMed Central and SpringerOpen authors in openly sharing their supplementary data. Figshare is now hosting additional files from more than 300 BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals. This new service to authors and


readers is aimed at: l Improving online display; l Improving readership of


and engagement with published articles;


l Increasing the discoverability of additional files (and articles);


l Providing richer, more specific metrics about the readership and reuse of additional files;


l Assigning each additional file a unique digital object identifier (DOI); and


l Providing each journal with its own portal within Springer Nature’s Figshare repository, giving each journal its own data repository.


Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, head of data publishing at Springer Nature, said: ‘We want to enable all of our authors and editors to publish the best research and promote wider access to data and materials that support publications.


‘To help achieve this we


have introduced enhanced display and discovery of supplementary materials, in partnership with Figshare, starting with BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journal articles. This is part of Springer Nature’s commitment to open research, enabling public accessibility and reuse of research through innovative policies, services and content features.’


Springer Nature has embarked on the partnership to integrate data sharing in existing journal workflows and article publication. Mark Hahnel, CEO of


Figshare added: ‘Springer Nature and BioMed Central are innovators in research data sharing and publishing, enabling researchers to make their data discoverable and reusable with industry-leading work on data policies, data journals, data licensing and support for data citation. ‘Springer Nature is also one the largest research publishers so I’m thrilled that so many researchers will benefit from better discoverability and reuse of their research data by the introduction of Figshare technology, starting with BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals.’


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