On March 20th, together with Backyard Brains, we published our latest paper in PLoS Biology – an article discussing the advancements and versatility of 3D printing technology, and how these technologies may be used by research scientists to customise existing lab equipment or build equipment from scratch. Importantly, 3D printing technology can do this at a mere fraction of what commercial alternatives cost, making this a crucial and innovative solution for scientific research in developing countries.
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For us, this was a very exciting time since this article helps to explain why we are so enthused by 3D printing and how much it can benefit developing nations. (See our page on Open Source technologies for African Labs here). The article publication was met with a press releases from the University of Tübingen.

 

We have been delighted to see how many other people are excited about the great potential for 3D printing! Both Medical News Today and Today’s Topics have posted a blog post, “Do-it-yourself neuroscience”. We are also very please that F1000 Research also picked up on our article and that we have been mentioned in their Open Source News at the end of last week, and to have had our article shared on LinkedIn by Autoscribe Informatics.

 

Additionally, an article written by Emma McBryde, 3D printing could unlock industry in developing nations, was published across multiple Australian news sites including The Queensland Times, South Burnett Times, The Daily Examiner, and Sunshine Coast Daily

 

The PLoS metrics indicate that our article was viewed a staggering 12,948 times within the first 11 days post-publication.
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With that in mind, we hopped over to Altmetric to check out our statistic there, and we are completely overwhelmed! With an Altmetric score of 353 in just 11 days, our article has been mentioned from 502 Twitter accounts!
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Not only that, but Altmetric’s analysis places our article in the 99th percentile, out of all 3,599,949 articles across all journals tracked by Altmetric so far… and 10th from the 2,405 articles from PLoS Biology!
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We have created a TReND in Africa Mendeley group, which contains details and links to our publications. Please feel free to follow this group and add comments and discussion points to our papers.

 

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who shared our paper and helped spread the news of 3D printing technologies for sustainable growth in developing countries – we’re on a mission, and your support is greatly appreciated.