‘Ask Me Anything’ promotes mental health research

18 May 2017

Two researchers from the School of Health Sciences have taken part in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) feature on the Reddit website that reached almost eight million people.

Dr Helen Brooks and Dr Kelly Rushton, both based in the Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, received almost 5,000 direct interactions with AMA providing them with further opportunities to share their work. The online discussion built upon the success of the Faculty’s previous AMA that took place in 2016 with nine times as much engagement and reach. Importantly, the AMA also resulted in significant increases in the Altmetric scores for the two papers featured.

Altmetric is a means by which scientific papers are judged for the ‘buzz’ they create in media: be it traditional print journalism, social media or on websites. The two papers that have been featured via AMAs have been catapulted to the top 5,000 papers of all time (out of a total of 10,000,000 papers). This puts them well within the top 1% of all scientific papers ever in terms of the number of online and print communications surrounding the paper.

Find out more:

• Reddit and The University of Manchester
• AMA Infographic