What is Altmetric and what does it offer?

Altmetric is a system that tracks the attention that research outputs such as scholarly articles and data sets receive online. It pulls data from:

• Social media such as X and Facebook

• Traditional media - both mainstream (The Guardian, New York Times) and field specific (New Scientist, Bird Watching). Many non-English language titles are covered. 

• Blogs - both major organisations (Cancer Research UK) and individual researchers

• Seminars, through our partnership with Cassyni

• Online reference managers like Mendeley

We track too many sources to list them individually but a more detailed breakdown is available here.

Altmetric cleans up and normalizes the data from these sources then makes it available for analysis. A key difference between Altmetric and other social media monitoring services is that Altmetric will disambiguate links to outputs: it knows that even though some X posts might link to a PubMed abstract, newspapers to the publisher's site and blog posts to a dx.doi.org link they're all talking about the same paper.

After Altmetric aggregates all of the information (we call each piece of information a post) it can find about a research output it looks at both the quantity and the quality of attention being paid to an output and visualises it:

The number inside the coloured circle (also called badge or donut) is the Altmetric Attention Score for the output being viewed. This is a quantitative measure of the quality and quantity of attention that the output has received - you can read more about the scoring algorithm here.

The colours themselves reflect where the posts mentioning the output came from. For example, red means that the output has been mentioned by mainstream news outlets, blue means it has been posted on X. You can find more information about the meaning of each colour here.

Altmetric data is available through different products, depending on what you need. For full descriptions and pricing, please visit our Solutions page.

Altmetric Explorer: a web platform to browse, search and report on attention data. It is offered at organisation level for Publishers, Institutions and Funders. See Introduction to the Altmetric Explorer.

Altmetric Badges: small visuals you can embed on your website to show the attention an output has received. See our Badges help section.

APIs: the Details Page API and the Explorer API give programmatic access to the data. See our APIs help section.

Altmetric on GBQ: Altmetric data in Google BigQuery, for technical teams. See the Altmetric on GBQ page.

Altmetric Consulting Services: a team of experts who analyse the data for you. See the Consulting page.

To request a quote or a demo, please fill the form at the bottom of the product page.

Altmetric gives you a wide and reliable view of the attention that research receives online. Key benefits include:

• Many types of sources, from policy documents and news to blogs and syllabi, so you get a more complete picture. You can also filter by publication, for example to look only at news from the New York Times.

• Individual mentions that you can view and export to CSV, so the underlying data is easy to access.

• Data for all research outputs, not only your own, so you can compare your outputs with those from other institutions.

• Protection against gaming. We avoid metrics that are easy to manipulate, such as Facebook likes and YouTube views. We also ignore repeated mentions of the same article by the same account, and X posts that show signs of gaming.