Facebook Hidden Engagement - PLOS ONE

Python and R scripts to collect data used to investigate the difference between public and private engagement numbers for PLOS ONE publications. Detailed description of the methodology can be found in this conference article presented at STI 2018.

More information about Hidden Engagement on Facebook and related projects can be found here.

Overview

1. Initial Data collection
   1. Collect all PLoS ONE articles for specified date range using the r-package rplos.
   2. Add identifiers provided by NCBI's FTP Service which provides the file PMC-ids.csv.gz.
2. Create URLs for each article
   1. See table below for more details.
3. Collect Facebook engagement counts
   1. Facebook: Query Graph API with each URL
   2. Altmetric LLP: Query the Altmetric API with each DOI

For each article (DOI, pmid, pmcid) we create 10 different URLs which we then use to query the Facebook Graph API.

URL type	Pattern
1	doi	https://doi.org/{doi}
2	doi_old	http://dx.doi.org/{doi}
3	landing	http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id={doi}
4	authors	http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/authors?id={doi}
5	metrics	http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/metrics?id={doi}
6	comments	http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id={doi}
7	related	http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/related?id={doi}
8	pdf	http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id={doi}&type=printable
9	pubmed	https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/{pmid}
10	pmc	https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/{pmcid}/

Reproduce results

1. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install python packages.
2. Install required r packages: rplos
3. Create config.cnf based on default_config.cnf and fill in your details
4. Set the date range in code/0_download_plos.R
5. Run scripts in code in order

External packages and data sources

rplos:

Scott Chamberlain, Carl Boettiger and Karthik Ram (2018). rplos: Interface to the Search API for 'PLoS' Journals. R package version 0.8.4. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rplos

Facebook Graph API

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/

NCBI's FTP service provides access to article identifiers:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/tools/ftp

Altmetric LLP data through their API:

https://api.altmetric.com/