Discovering How Trending Article Types Change Over Time in Different Countries

For our Big Data Project we spent a lot of time learning about Altmetrics and its data before concluding on a topic to Analyze. We researched about the company, Altmetric itself and looked in depth at the data sets provided to us. We used python tools to open the files and physically read through them to get a comprehensive understanding of what the Altmetrics dataset was. Having no prior knowledge of any type of Big Data or data analysis it took some time to really understand what the data was and how we would be able to analyze it. With all of our team members having a lot of experience programming we decided to use R for data analysis. Coming from a Java, R was a bit of a learning curve due to all of the packages, however we quickly realized these packages were R’s main strength as it made the tools needed to analyze Altmetric data readily and easily available.

In doing this research our team began to realize the importance of Altmetric. The data collected was extremely relevant, organized and easy to analyze on both a macro and micro level. This allows us to be able to see where science is going and see what people in general are interested in and which people are interested in specific topics. Prior to learning about Altmetrics are team would have never known data like this was available. The fact that Altmetrics has this information and is allowing people to study these important trends.

Once we familiarized ourselves with the basics of what we needed to get started, it was time to choose a topic. Something that originally peaked our interest was the demographics section of the Altmetric dataset. We chose to focus on the locations in the demographics section. For our final question that we came up with, How did trending article types change over time in different countries?. This would determine how significant new research is and contrast the differences between different countries’ preferences towards research papers.