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A Scientist-Practitioner’s Guide to Tracking Personal Dissemination Impact: Using the Altmetric Attention Score and Bookmarklet

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Abstract

A free tool for measuring dissemination impact (as opposed to scholarly citation impact) is reviewed. The tool is easy to use and provides much information of interest to the scientist-practitioner who is interested in publishing articles that promote the dissemination of applied behavior analysis. It may also help applied behavior analysts meet the ethics code requirement to strive for accurate representation of their work in public forums like social media.

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. The cultural power of the printed word (McCuskey, 2014) is what makes these written records seem a good place to start in measuring dissemination-relevant attention. But full disclosure: There is debate in the bibliometrics literature about whether it is justified to call this kind of attention "impact." Critics point out that altmetric mentions can be superficial, i.e., not indicate a profound influence over someone's daily functioning (e.g., Sugimoto, 2015). We think this argument is misguided, however, because it implies that other forms of mention, such as those in scholarly citations, are by contrast always substantive. In reality, citations often demonstrate "an apparent lack of engagement with the cited literature" (Horbach et al., 2021, p. 1). Therefore, although some altmetric mentions indeed are superficial (as acknowledged later in this article), this doesn't make the attention score any less valid than other means of estimating "impact."

  2. Most journal websites list an article's DOI along with title, authors, abstract, and other core information.

  3. All data presented here were obtained via the Bookmarklet on February 7–11, 2022.

  4. For details: https://help.altmetric.com/support/solutions/articles/6000235926-twitter

  5. Book content is incorporated into the Altmetric.com database under certain circumstances. For more information, including about a tool that can search book content, see https://help.altmetric.com/support/solutions.

  6. For specifics of how different types of mentions are weighted in calculating the attention score, see https://help.altmetric.com/support/solutions/articles/6000233311-how-is-the-altmetric-attention-score-calculated-

  7. Within reason. Articles older than the electronic sources of altmetric data have reduced odds of receiving mentions, although there are some exceptions to this rule (e.g., see the Upper article in Table 1).

  8. As tabulated by Altmetric.con. No two tools tabulate citations in exactly the same way, so the counts shown here are likely to disagree with those in the more familiar Google Scholar and Web of Science.

  9. Most contemporary observers see the study is as forcibly imposing cisgender norms. The procedures described in the study have been condemned by the journal that originally published it (Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior & LeBlanc, 2020) and by the Association for Behavior Analysis International (2022).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA

    Thomas S. Critchfield

  2. Center for Autism and Related Disorders, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Dennis R. Dixon

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  1. Thomas S. Critchfield
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  2. Dennis R. Dixon
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Correspondence to Thomas S. Critchfield or Dennis R. Dixon.

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The authors declare no competing financial or nonfinancial interests related to this article or the product described therein.

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Because this article presents only information available in public databases (no primary research data), oversight by an Institutional Review Board or Animal Care and Use Committee is irrelevant.

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The two authors (Thomas S. Critchfield and Dennis R. Dixon) be listed jointly as corresponding authors.

Cheryl Ecott provided helpful feedback on a draft of this article.

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Critchfield, T.S., Dixon, D.R. A Scientist-Practitioner’s Guide to Tracking Personal Dissemination Impact: Using the Altmetric Attention Score and Bookmarklet. Behav Analysis Practice 15, 1006–1014 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-022-00725-5

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