Did you know it’s possible to compare your articles in The Conversation with not just your peers at Flinders, but with the readership achieved by other institutions?

In the past 12 months, Flinders University has lifted its contribution to TC – having the most articles accepted for publication, achieving the highest readership and attracting the highest audience engagement.

The featured graph shows Flinders University has overtaken University of Adelaide and University of South Australia for the year to date for number of articles published and reads.

By comparison it was a closer race in the preceding year, with UoA attracting more readers for the same number of published articles as Flinders (89 articles each, UoA 4.28m reads, Flinders 4m reads), and UniSA publishing few articles but attracting overall greater readership (65 articles, 4.3m reads.)

Notable contributions during the year to date include:

• Professor Corey Bradshaw’s ‘Ghastly Future’ analysis which is on the cusp of achieving 500,000 reads (and his ‘ancient superhighways’ research has achieved almost 200,000 reads; in fact Corey has five articles amongst the top 20 Flinders items for the past year!)
• Associate Professor Alice Gorman’s article on ‘How to live in space’ has topped 300,000 reads (and Alice has three articles in the Flinders top 20)
• Professor Jonathan Benjamin’s discovery of submerged Indigenous artefacts off the WA coast achieved one of the largest immediate readerships, amassing 150,000+ readers within a matter of days, and was republished 17 times.
• And Dr Kacie Dickinson’s 2018 article ‘if sugar is bad for you why is the sugar in fruit ok’ continues to attract tens of thousands of readers each month, demonstrating the cumulative benefit of articles in The Conversation,  thanks to its format which affords ongoing accessibility.

Author statistics can be assessed for specific time periods and analytics can be provided to support impact and engagement metrics required for grant applications and the like.

For instance, Professor John Long is one of Flinders University’s most prolific authors, with 42 published articles, and certainly our most read, having last month topped 2 million readers since his first TC story in July 2013. He holds the Flinders record for most read article with his piece on giant Megalodon sharks attracting more than 760,000 readers. We also know that the majority of his readers – nearly 900,000 – are in the United States, demonstrating the international interest in his work.

If you would like to know more about getting your research featured in The Conversation and harnessing the analytics, contact the Flinders media team newsdesk@flinders.edu.au