‘Perspectives in Male Psychology’ is getting a huge amount of attention, according to Altmetrics

CommentaryMedia

Jul 17

On July 15th our textbook Perspectives in Male Psychology: An Introduction achieved a new milestone: it reached an Altmetric score of 500! Hooray… but what does this number mean?

According to Altmetric.com, the company who compiles these scores: “Altmetrics are a simple and effective way of understanding who is engaging with research online and what they’re saying” and a way to “quickly collate a record of relevant online attention”.

The score is compiled from the amount of attention from various online sources, “such as public policy documents, online reference managers, social media (Facebook, X, Google+, etc.), Wikipedia, post-publication peer-review platforms, patents, etc.”.

“in general if an article scores 20 or more then it's doing far better than most of its contemporaries”.

A rule-of-thumb for understanding how good an altmetric score is suggested by Altmetric.com: “in general if an article scores 20 or more then it's doing far better than most of its contemporaries”.

Another way to look at scores is the ‘top 100’ list published by Altmetric.com between 2013 and 2020 of research articles from all fields. The scores varied from year to year, and on average the threshold to make the top 100 list was about 1500, but on one of those years a score of 500 would have made it to number 90 in the list.

Before we celebrate too much, there are a few caveats. Firstly, the top 100 list is for academic research papers rather than academic textbooks. Although the two formats are different, according to an Altmetric blog posted by the Book Industry Group: “In terms of overall coverage, books receive roughly the same amount of attention as journal articles”, so they might not be all that dissimilar.

Another difference is there tends to be a delay in books accumulating altmetic scores, which dampens the score for new books. On the other hand, like the tortoise and the hare, over time book scores tend to catch up with scores for research papers, and might even exceed them. Perspectives was published in 2021, so is probably just starting to get into its stride.

Note also that free (‘open access’) books have an advantage over books you have to pay for, like Perspectives. (Note: textbooks can be expensive, so it’s always a good idea to check with your university library first to see if you can borrow a copy of Perspectives. If it’s not already in stock, sometimes your librarian will get it in stock for you if you request it).

In looking into how altmetrics are compiled, I came across the suggestion that they can be ‘gamed’ by spamming the internet. This must be true at least to some extent, though reassuringly in the case of Perspectives the score seems to be mostly due to people with large accounts on X posting about the book. The Centre for Male Psychology and the book authors certainly posted about Perspectives on X, but as it turns out the kind of posts we usually made weren’t the kind that get counted into the altmetric score.

One final thing to consider is that the score is about attention, but of course in life not all attention is good attention. Altmetric.com note the case of a scientific paper that got an impressively high score… but only because it was so roundly debunked and denounced. So how much of the attention around Perspectives was negative? To be honest I can’t recall any negative comments, though no doubt there are some out there somewhere, and indeed why shouldn’t people post whatever thoughts they have, positive or negative. In any case I’d like to offer sincere thanks to everyone who has made positive comments, or reposted the positive comments of others, about Perspectives, and not just the luminaries like Rob Henderson, Chris Williamson, Steve Stewart-Williams, and Jordan Peterson, but also the many others who took the time to highlight something they liked about Perspectives and wanted to share with others.

Given that male psychology is such a new field it’s very encouraging to know that this book has received so much positive attention, because it means - I hope - that issues facing men and boys are starting to be recognised.

Reference: Liddon, L., & Barry, J. (2021). Perspectives in male psychology: An introduction. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 978-1-119-68535-7

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