JWM beyond the Journal Impact Factor

In the era of the Impact Agenda, pressure is mounting to demonstrate the value of research beyond its impact on other researchers (Thelwall 2021). As a complement to scientific impact factors, so-called alternative metrics or Altmetrics attempt to gauge societal attention to published research articles by tracking digital mentions within news outlets, blogs, Wikipedia entries, policy documents, social media feeds (e.g., X, Reddit, Facebook), and reference managers like Mendeley (Williams 2017, Javed Ali 2021). Major platforms like Altmetrics or PlumX calculate an integrated attention score that weights the volume of mentions by the importance or authority of their sources (Javed Ali 2021). Studies have demonstrated that alternative metrics operate in a different orthogonal dimension than citation-based metrics (Bornmann and Haunschild 2018), and if the latter captures research quality the former captures public interest irrespective of quality. Like any metric, attention scores have limitations—among other concerns Altmetrics could be easily manipulated by social media platforms, some topics are inherently more interesting to people than others irrespective of their value to society, geographic and language biases are apparent, sensational claims or topics are likely to receive more attention than serious academic research, and the nature of the attention (positive or negative) is not captured (Patthi et al. 2017, Williams 2017, Javed Ali 2021). The field of alternative metrics is new and rapidly evolving. Most scholars advise that Altmetrics should be considered complementary to traditional impact metrics while maintaining a healthy degree of skepticism (García-Villar 2021, Thelwall 2021).

With full access to Altmetrics.com being provided to me by Wiley, I conducted a search on 6 December 2024 for the Journal of Wildlife Management (JWM; no specified date range) to identify the top 10 most highly scored papers and see what characteristics they might share (Table 1). One advantage of Altmetrics is that they can gauge immediate social interest, whereas peer-reviewed citations can take years to materialize. One top 10 paper was published 13 years ago, 3 were published 6-7 years ago, 3 were published 3-4 years ago, and 3 were published in the last 2 years. Only 30% of these articles were published Open Access (Hanley et al. 2022, Ramey et al. 2022, Wightman et al. 2024). Of the 10 lead authors, 40% were female.

In terms of content, 7 were original research articles, 2 were review articles, and 1 was an Editor's note introducing a special section. Several of the top 10 articles focused on health issues (e.g., lead poisoning, avian influenza) or received press coverage because of the risk of a spillover health issue (e.g., deadly herpes virus in macaques). With these articles, news media spiked quite rapidly after publication and in some cases may have been aided by university media releases. Several other articles focused on charismatic species of conservation concern (e.g., giraffe, sage grouse, Canada lynx), which proved timely based on reported species declines in the case of giraffe and upticks in oil and gas development in the case of sage grouse. Others generated serious social media chatter, such as the study of fatal bear attacks, which seemed to be spurred by a fatal black bear attack in New Jersey, USA, that occurred 3 years after the paper was originally published. In contrast, the paper on wild turkey survival, published online early in December (and Open Access), precipitated a flurry of regional news articles the following spring as males started their annual display. The most highly ranked paper, a modeling exercise showing how exposure to environmental lead is likely to suppress bald eagle resilience to future stressors, received national and international media attention as West Nile Virus was reported in eagles.

The top two papers make an interesting comparison, as they were published in the same year, both Open Access, but differed in 1 being a review article and the other being original research. One would expect a review article to receive more citations than an original research article, and indeed the Ramey et al. (2022) paper received 100 scholarly citations (Google Scholar search 26 Dec 2024) and 18,724 full text downloads (Wiley Insights 26 Dec 2024) compared to 19 and 9,861, respectively, for the Hanley et al. (2022) paper. Clearly, both are highly influential papers to the scientific community and the broader public and yet we observe magnitudes of difference between the different metrics we might use to quantify their impact.

While perusing the Altmetrics.com output, I noted for each of the top 10 articles that the Altmetric attention score was in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric and had a high attention score compared to outputs of the same age. That made me curious as to where JWM ranks overall with respect to other journals in terms of publishing wildlife research that garners broad public attention. So, this time I searched for wildlife (again no date or other restrictions), and from these results I retained the top 100 articles based on Altmetric attention score and tallied how many were published by a given journal (Table 2).

Both JWM and Wildlife Society Bulletin made the top 10 list of journals publishing wildlife articles that have generated substantial public attention according to Altmetrics.com. Whereas we consider the journal Wildlife Research as a peer in terms of scope and traditional measures of impact (e.g., Journal Impact Factor), the list indicates our peers, in terms of public attention, also include the likes of Science and Nature and several other journals that have a much broader scope and substantially higher traditional Impact Factors.

In terms of the top 10 wildlife articles overall, 60% were original research articles (the remainder were review papers or meta-analyses), 80% were Open Access, and 44% were first authored by a female researcher. Again health-related topics dominated public interest with 3 articles focusing on SARS-CoV-2 (e.g., wildlife markets [Crits-Christoph et al. 2024], lockdown effects [Rutz et al. 2020], white-tailed deer as a reservoir [Caserta et al. 2023]), the Hanley et al. (2022) article on lead in bald eagles, a study of wildlife abundance around Chernobyl (Deryabina et al. 2015), and another focused on potential zoonotic diseases imported through the wildlife trade (Pavlin et al. 2009). Others making the list focused on feral and pet cat effects on wildlife (Loss et al. 2013, Legge et al. 2020), human disturbance effects on wildlife nocturnality (Gaynor et al. 2018), and the potential role of large carnivores in wildlife–vehicle collisions (Gilbert et al. 2017). Each had a strong and direct link to human activities and human interests.

It is important to promote your research. Gaining public attention may be helped by media offices within your place of employment, The Wildlife Society, or Wiley by issuing press releases or blogs as articles are published or as events occur (such as wild turkey mating season or an outbreak of avian influenza) that past articles help inform (Krausman 2022a, b). There is ongoing discussion about the fact that attention is not impact, with attention being a complex and intangible measure of community engagement. Having followed the links to various press articles and social media outlets for JWM's top 10 articles, I can say these papers have proven relevant and interesting to broad swaths of the public, and that is important to The Wildlife Society. But how do posts on X translate to conservation outcomes? Does a high Altmetric attention score reflect a public more knowledgeable about wildlife issues and engaged in conservation?

Alternative metrics are becoming part of mainstream conversation when speaking of research impact. They may help bolster grant proposals, or flesh out promotion dossiers, for those wanting to show broader public engagement. My inquiry into alternative metrics helped frame a more inclusive picture of the potential impact of JWM beyond the traditional Journal Impact Factor. For example, Wiley insights indicated a 78% increase in full text views since 2019 and Altmetrics identified 2,026 unique policy sources referencing JWM articles across 22 different countries. Without a doubt, the impact of JWM extends beyond our Journal Impact Factor although the question remains … how do we effectively quantify impact?