Case Study: National Physical Laboratory predicts research impact with Altmetric

National Physical Laboratory Predicting Impactful Research

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the UK's national measurement institute, sought to find an early indicator for the societal impact of its research. Using the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions platform, NPL analyzed altmetrics data for over 41,000 publications to see how online attention correlated with official peer-review assessments of research impact.

Altmetric's analysis revealed a strong positive correlation between high Altmetric Attention Scores and peer-reviewed judgments of high-impact research. This provided NPL with evidence that altmetrics are a valuable, faster-acting indicator of societal impact compared to traditional bibliometrics. The results of this work will be published, and NPL plans to use Altmetric data for further analysis into news and policy mentions.

National Physical Laboratory

Jenny Wooldridge

National Physical Laboratory