Analysis: The climate papers most featured in the media in 2018
In a year dominated by events such as Brexit, royal weddings, the Salisbury poisonings, US Supreme Court nominations and the World Cup, there was still space in the news media in 2018 for reporting on new climate research.
These new journal papers were reported around the world in news articles and blogs and shared on social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit. Tracking all these “mentions” was Altmetric, an organisation that scores and ranks papers according to the attention they receive. (Full details of how the Altmetric scoring system works can be found in an earlier article.)
Using Altmetric data for 2018, Carbon Brief has compiled its annual list of the 25 most talked-about climate change-related papers of the year. The infographic above shows which ones made it into the Top 10.
Top spot
The most talked-about paper last year on any topic, not just climate change, was “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria”, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. This came first in Altmetric’s Top 100 journal papers of 2018 with an overall Altmetric score of over 10,000.
The press focused on the study’s estimate that the number of deaths in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017 was around 70 times higher than official figures. The study received further coverage when US President Donald Trump later tweeted his disagreement after Puerto Rico’s government increased its official death toll.
While the paper is related to climate change – human-caused warming is likely to have played a role in 2017’s unusually active hurricane season – it focuses on mortality statistics rather than the climate. Therefore, it does not it does not make it into Carbon Brief’s list of research papers.
The highest-ranked climate research paper is “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene“, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (“PNAS”) and led by Prof Will Steffen of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Australian National University. It accrued an Altmetric score of 6,061.
Widely referred to as the “Hothouse Earth” paper, the study explored the self-reinforcing “feedback loops” that could magnify how the Earth warms in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. These feedbacks could push the Earth’s climate beyond a “planetary threshold”, the paper suggests, which – if crossed – could “lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions”.
The paper was the fifth most talked-about of all journal papers published last year. It was the subject of 460 news stories in 326 outlets, including the Guardian, BBC News, Sky News, New Scientist, Al Jazeera and the Sydney Morning Herald. Links to the paper were also included in 5,392 tweets and 34 Facebook posts.
The Top 5
Falling between this year’s first and second-ranked papers is “The biomass distribution on Earth”, published in PNAS. While its Altmetric score of 4,413 would be enough for second spot and the paper does estimate the carbon stored in the world’s plants and animals, its principal focus is providing “a census of the biomass of all kingdoms of life”. As with the Hurricane Maria paper, it therefore earns an honourable mention rather than a place on the leaderboard.
In second place, published in Nature, is “Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages”. The paper, led by Prof Terry Hughes of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia, warns that corals on the Great Barrier Reef began to die immediately in the aftermath of the record-breaking marine heatwave in 2016.
Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-climate-papers-most-featured-in-media-2018