Outreach and Post-Publication Impact of Soil Erosion Modelling Literature

Back in the 1930s, the aphorism “publish or perish” first appeared in an academic context. Today, this phrase is becoming a harsh reality in several academic environments, and scientists are giving increasing attention to publishing and disseminating their scientific work. Soil erosion modelers make no exception. With the introduction of the bibliometric field, the evaluation of the impact of a piece of scientific work becomes more articulated. The post-publication impact of the research became an important aspect too. In this study, we analyse the outreach and the impact of the literature on soil erosion modelling using the altmetric database, i.e., Altmetric. In our analysis, we use only a small fraction (around 15%) of Global Applications of Soil Erosion Modelling Tracker (GASEMT) papers because only 257 papers out of 1697 had an Altmetric Score (AS) larger than 0. We observed that media and policy documents mentioned more frequently literature dealing with global-scale assessments and future projection studies than local-scale ones. Papers that are frequently cited by researchers do not necessarily also yield high media and policy outreach. The GASEMT papers that had an AS larger than 0 were, on average, mentioned by one policy document and five Twitter users and had 100 Mendeley readers. Only around 5% and 9% of papers with AS > 0 appeared in news articles and blogs, respectively. However, this percentage was around 45% for Twitter and policy mentions. The top GASEMT paper’s upper bound was around 1 million Twitter followers, while this number was around 10,000 for the 10th ranked GASEMT paper. The exponentially increasing trend for erosion modelling papers having an AS has been confirmed, as during the last 3 years (2014–2017), we estimated that the number of entries had doubled compared to 2011–2014 and quadrupled if we compare it with 2008–2011.