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I often find myself wanting to find brand-new scientific articles within certain search parameters (e.g., words in the title, journal, etc.) that are currently "trending" in scholarly or public attention. As far as I know, standard academic search engines that allow the use of such search parameters offer only metrics such as citation counts, whereas I am interested in something more immediate like Altmetrics. Searching sites like Twitter or Google News better captures instantaneous public attention, but allows only the most rudimentary of searches.

I found ScienceOpen, but it seems to have an extremely limited set of journal articles.

What's the closest thing to a Google Scholar-Altmetrics lovechild?

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    Can you be more specific? "Trending" meaning the general public took interest or it would be of value to you as a scholar or researcher? Because those are extremely different questions. – user18072 Jul 15 '16 at 23:03
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    It sounds like a fascinating product if such a thing exists, but it also sounds like a hard problem to solve. The vast majority of news outlets that mention studies don't bother to even use the proper title or in any way cite the original source in a way that makes it easy to find (I think the Atlantic is the only news source I've found that very reliably does). Most of the time popular attention is of the form, "A recent study from Harvard...[description of something completely made up that wasn't in the study at all]." – BrianH Jul 15 '16 at 23:28
  • @djechlin, I'd be interested in either case: (1) Articles that are capturing the public's attention (operationalized similarly to Altmetric, for example); (2) Articles that scholars are discussing (via platforms like Twitter) or adding to their public reference libraries but not yet citing. – half-pass Jul 16 '16 at 2:38
  • @BrianDHall, that's true, though Altmetric has a reasonable algorithm. It's probably always an underestimate for the reasons you suggest, but still should be decent as a relative metric for comparing articles. For example, I don't really care if an article has been mentioned 300 times or 500, only that it's been mentioned more than similar articles. – half-pass Jul 16 '16 at 2:39
  • Have you tryed www.researchgate.net? but you need to know which topics to follow, then your timeline will be updated accordingly – Robert Jul 16 '16 at 12:15
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You can see the arxiv repository site that is very interesting. This site Arxiv has an electronic archive and distribution server for research articles in Physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology and statistics. The interesting point is that you can access to the recent papers in these fields as soon as possible even before long story of publication process! Also, you can subscribe to automatic email alerts from the subjects you'd like to see recent submitted papers in them.

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  • arXiv is certainly a good repository for preprints in the fields that it covers, but I don't see how it helps identify work that is "trending". In fact, as a matter of policy, they don't publish hit counts or any other sort of analytics. – Nate Eldredge Sep 1 '16 at 23:48
  • Im using arXiv and based on new submitted papers, I can find the current trend in the research. As a researcher there doesn't exist any appropriate tools as your knowledge in a specified field. You need hard work to become a successful researcher. Also I don't understand your negative point on my comment. I thought that the goal of here is to share our experience. – Hadi Sep 2 '16 at 8:04

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