How Are Policy Document Mentions to Academic Papers Accumulated?

This article investigates the lengths of time that publications with different numbers of policy document mentions take to receive their first mention (the beginning stage), and then compares the lengths of time to receive two or more mentions after receiving the first mention (the accumulative stage) based on complete policy document dataset from Altmetric database. We find that in response time distribution, i.e., from zero to one policy document mention, highly and mediumly mentioned papers exhibit obviously different lengths of time compared with lowly mentioned papers. In accumulative time distribution, i.e., from one to N policy document mentions, highly mentioned papers begin to receive mentions much more rapidly than medium‐ and low‐mentioned papers. However, as N increases, the difference in receiving new mentions among high‐, medium‐, and low‐mentioned publications does not increase quite significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]