Altmetric Attention Score calculation for books

The Altmetric Attention Score for a book is calculated based on the weighted attention to the book and its chapters. 

It's important to understand that the book's score is not a simple sum of the Altmetric scores for its individual chapters. Instead, the score is calculated by pooling all mentions of the book and its chapters together and treating them as a single entity. 

This ensures that if the same author or outlet mentions multiple different chapters within the same book, they are only counted once towards the overall book score. 

Calculating a simple sum of the chapter scores would be an invalid representation of the book's total attention, as it would disproportionately inflate the influence of authors or sources that repeatedly mention different parts of the same book. See our worked examples below.

Example 1: The Altmetric Attention Score for a book with book-level attention only.

The book does not have any chapter-level attention, so the attention score is collated the same way it would be for any other scholarly output. 

Example 2: The Altmetric Attention Score for a book with book and chapter-level attention.

This book has both chapter and book level attention. Brian has posted on X about both a chapter and the book. Since he is an individual contributor to the attention score it is only counted once. Jo has posted about the same chapter various times, this will only contribute once to the overall attention score.

Example 3: The Altmetric Attention Score for a book with chapter-level attention only.

This book has chapter-level attention only. While there is a post for Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 they were both posted by Jo. Each chapter then has a score of 1, but as those two come from the same source they only contribute once to the overall score. 

 As before, it is important to view the Altmetric Attention Score in context and consider it alongside the qualitative, underlying data: the mentions.