Dr Martin Whitely (Research Fellow) and Professor John Phillimore (Executive Director) of the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy at Curtin published their research findings that the youngest children in a school year were more likely to be diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD, raising questions around immaturity being mistaken for ADHD.
Their Open Access short note in the Medical Journal of Australia won Curtin’s most newsworthy academic article award. The authors then arranged to pay an Article Processing Fee to make a follow-up systematic review in the Wiley Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry also available open access for anyone to read.
Backed up with global media and social media promotion, lots of attention was generated in the form of syndicated news stories, requests for radio and TV interviews and social media attention. Their article was picked up by the Wall Street Journal and received 40,000 hits on Reddit’s science section. This put their article in the top 0.05% of all outputs ever tracked by Altmetric Explorer, reaching an estimated 5.3 million people.
Pictured: Professor John Phillimore and Dr Martin Whitely
