UB scientific performance has the highest visibility online

The UB is the most visible Spanish university on the Internet due its scientific performance, according to a study led by researchers of the University of Granada. The study analysed the presence of more than 120,000 scientific articles published by sixty-six Spanish universities during the 2014-2016 period through several alternative indicators such as Altmetrics, which include many social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and Mendeley.

According to the results of the study, published in the journal El Profesional de la Información, the University of Barcelona holds the first position in the rankings in Twitter, news in digital media, Wikipedia and Facebook, while Pompeu Fabra University and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona are among the top four positions. The Complutense University of Madrid and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid are part of the other outstanding area of universities, since they are among the top ten positions, and the universities of Valencia, Basque Country and Oviedo hold important positions as well. Regarding the private universities, only the University of Navarra appears among the top ten in Twitter and Facebook.

Esteban Romero, Daniel Torres-Salinas and Pedro Castillo, researchers of the University of Granada who carried out the analysis, elaborated this study out of the creation of an online platform aiming to determine the reliability of new metrics to define the impact of scientific publications. The authors of the study stated these data prove the interest in science online and the reliability of the uses of different metrics to set the impact of a scientific publication, specially its social impact.

Image: Laboratory of the UB