HEDS in the media in 2016

HEDS’ research and collaborations receive a lot of coverage in the press and across social and traditional media platforms. We have looked back over the past year to pick out a few highlights from some of our work that received coverage and how far it reached across social media and other notable web citations.

According to Altmetric.com our research and collaborations with external partners recieved 4,756 mentions in 2016 with a couple of weeks still to go. Altmetric tracks all of our research outputs, so many of the new mentions were also for research pre-2016, but we will take a look at a few of the notable highlights from this year’s outputs.

HEDS Altmetric data for 2016

Of the mentions, 105 were news items, our research was cited in 24 policy documents and 17 Wikipedia citations. On social media our research was mentioned in 4,391 Tweets, 121 Facebook Shares and 17 Google+ shares. whilst it was linked and featured on 72 blog posts, mentioned on open peer review and ranked on Reddit on a handful of occasions. Our research and collaborations were Tweeted about in 34 different countries with the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada and Spain being the most prominent communicators.

It is important to say that this is the research mentions we are aware of, as Altmetric can only track research that has some kind of digital object identifier - such as a PubMed ID - in the communications.

Our Sheffield Alcohol Research Group continued their strong research output alongside collaborators again. ‘Are recent attempts to quit smoking associated with reduced drinking in England? A cross-sectional population survey’ received a lot of attention with 34 mentions in the news media. Top Sante, Metro News, NHS Choices, Google News alongside many regional news publications ran stories based on the conclusions from the research.

Dr Andrew Booth’s paper ‘Searching for qualitative research for inclusion in systematic reviews: a structured methodological review’ received a lot of traction thanks to 216 Tweets as well as a mention on the Evidently Cochrane Blog.

Building the Evidence Base of Blood-Based Biomarkers for Early Detection of Cancer: A Rapid Systematic Mapping Review was mentioned by a dozen news outlets. The research was featured in news by Science Daily, Genomeweb, Medical News Today, Health Medicine Network and Health Canal among others. The work was done by Lesley Utley, Helen Buckley Woods and Susan Harnan with collaborators based at institutions in the Midlands.