Identifying science in the news: An assessment of the precision and recall of Altmetric.com news mention data.

ABSTRACT: The company Altmetric is often used to collect mentions of research in online news stories, yet there have been concerns about the quality of this data. This study investigates these concerns. Using a manual content analysis of 400 news stories as a comparison method, we analyzed the precision and recall with which Altmetric identified mentions of research in 8 news outlets. We also used logistic regression to identify the characteristics of research mentions that influence their likelihood of being successfully identified. We find that, for a predefined set of outlets, Altmetric's news mention data were relatively accurate (F-score = 0.80), with very high precision (0.95) and acceptable recall (0.70), although recall is below 0.50 for some news outlets. Altmetric is more likely to success

SUBMITTER: Fleerackers A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9526208 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature