How outputs are tracked and measured

Altmetric monitors a range of non-traditional sources, searching for links and references to published research.

To track the online attention for a piece of research, we need three things:

1. An output, such as a journal article or a dataset.

2. A unique identifier attached to the output, such as a DOI, ISBN or handle.

3. Mentions of the output in the attention sources we track.

The identifier is very important. It is how we match each mention to the right research. Without it, we cannot know which mentions belong to which output.

Once we pick up a mention, we collect it together with any other attention we have found for that output. You can see it all on the Altmetric Details Page, with its own badge (donut) and Altmetric Attention Score, which is calculated automatically.

To learn more about how mentions are collected, see Collecting mentions to research outputs.