I was really excited to get news from the Ibis journal that my paper with Don Brightsmith and Gustavo Martinez was the journal’s top-scoring paper in 2017, according to the Almetric score.
A lot of the credit for getting the news out about this paper goes to Jenna Marshall and Katie Mast of the Santa Fe Institute’s Communications department. They have been really fantastic to work with, and have taught me a ton about science communication. Coverage like this can be critical to disseminating results within the scientific community: “The Altmetric Attention Score of a research article has quickly become understood and talked about. In ornithology we have recently learned that online mentions contribute to citations of articles published in ornithology journals, and Twitter in particular is a major player and contributes 75% of ornithology journals altmetrics (2012-2016).” (from Ibis).
News coverage is also critical to disseminating scientific results to the broader public. Altmetric does a nice job of collating this coverage (news coverage, compiled by Altmetric). Highlights were articles in Forbes and on NPR’s “The Salt”.
This paper also has a fun origin story. I was a field volunteer with the Tambopata Macaw Project in Peru way back in 2003! (They still take volunteers)
In 2013, I was looking to pick up some more collaborations, and branch out on certain areas of my research direction. I reached out to Don Brightsmith, who has run the macaw project since the late 1990’s, to see if he’d be interested in working together. He was, and the dataset has been super fun to explore. Don and I finally met in person in 2015 at a bird conference, and the paper (first of many!) was published in 2017.
Along the way, there were many many drafts of the main plots. Because the data are seasonal, I wanted to go with a radial plot to show the patterns (R package plotrix, radial plots). As part of my training program for my future field assistants (otherwise known as my two kids), I often bring home plots I’m working on. They like to adjust my color schemes, and our combined efforts are often up on the fridge.
I joked with the kids that once this paper finally got published, we should all go to Peru so they could see the parrots in person. Now that it’s out, I suppose it’s time to make some travel plans…
