Sinan Aral’s paper “The Spread of True and False News Online” (co-authored with Deb Roy and Soroush Vosoughi, both at MIT Media Lab), which was published on the cover of Science in March, has not only made the Top 10 of the Altmetric Top 100 list; it has been ranked by Altmetric as the second-most-talked-about academic paper of 2018 in any scientific discipline. In order to more fully capture the influence and reach of scholarly work and identify research generating significant international online attention and discussion, Altmetric tracks many distinct sources, including—in addition to a scholarly citation database—public-policy papers, news articles, blogs, syllabi, and social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.
The ranking was announced in “The most discussed and shared scientific research of 2018.” Aral’s paper was given an Altmetric Attention Score of 8646, with details here.