Our mission is to track the conversations around research outputs online wherever they're happening. To that end we're constantly looking for new sources of data.
Specifically what we're looking for are sources that regularly link to scholarly content, though in some cases like news outlets and policy documents we're also able to perform text mining to try to match research mentioned (but not linked to) with published scholarly articles. We can only do this robustly under certain circumstances.
Sometimes we're held back by the level of access available and sometimes the source just doesn't contain enough content to be worth tracking. If you would like to suggest a new attention source do let us know with the feedback option or by email.
Research outputs
- Books
- Book Chapters
- Journal Articles
- Presentations
- Theses/Dissertations
- Reports
- Conference proceedings
- Reviews
- Data Sets
- Working papers
- Grey literature
- Clinical Trials
- And more!
Attention sources
Altmetric currently tracks the following attention sources for mentions of research outputs. Where possible we surface the original text of each mention, and in some cases are also able to provide demographic data on the author of the mention. It's crucial to us that all of our data is fully auditable, and that you can see not only how many people are talking about the research, but who they are and what they're saying.
1. Policy documents
We track a wide range of public policy documents for mentions. We define policy documents as any policy, guidance, or guidelines document from a governmental or non-governmental organisation.
2. Mainstream media
This list currently extends to over 5000 English and non-English global news outlets.
3. Blogs
We maintain a manually curated list of over 15,000 academic and non-academic blogs. These are tracked automatically via RSS feeds.
4. Online reference managers
- Mendeley
- CiteULike
5. Post-publication peer-review forums
- PubPeer
- Historical data: Publons - We no longer pick up reviews from Publons but you will still see the historical mentions on details pages.
6. Social media
- Twitter (public tweets, quoted tweets and retweets only, no favourites)
- Facebook (posts on a curated list of public Pages only, no individual page, no group posts and no likes)
- Reddit (original posts only, not comments)
- Historical data: Google+ - We can no longer pick up mentions from Google+, but you will still see historical mentions on details pages.
- Historical data: Pinterest - We can no longer pick up mentions from Pinterest, but you will still see historical mentions on details pages.
- Historical data: LinkedIn groups - LinkedIn have now unfortunately closed their data stream so we are unable to pick up new mentions from this source. You will still see mentions made before the stream was closed.
7. Patent citations
We track patent citations from nine jurisdictions around the world. Patents are a type of intellectual property that are held by either an inventor or a holder.
Altmetric's patent data comprises nine different jurisdictions:
WO : World Intellectual Property Organization
AU : IP Australia
DE : German Patent and Trade Mark Office
CH : Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property
EP : European Patent Office (EPO)
US : United States Patent and Trademark Office
FR : National Industrial Property Institute
GB : Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom
NL : Netherlands Patent Office
8. Other online sources
- Wikipedia
- Sites running Stack Exchange (Q&A)
- F1000Prime recommendations
- YouTube
- Open Syllabus
- Citations (Dimensions and Web of Science) - Citations are only available within the Explorer. Web of Science citations require an existing subscription with Clarivate Analytics.
Source name | Collection method | Update frequency | Notes |
Third party data provider API | Real-time feed | Demographics, support for retweets, with monitoring of suspicious activity. | |
Facebook API | Weekly | Posts on public Facebook Pages only, with prioritised popular Pages. | |
Policy documents | PDFs collected and scanned from policy sources and repositories | Varies by policy doc (min monthly updates) | Scanning and text-mining policy document PDFs for references, which are looked up in CrossRef/PubMed and resolved to DOIs. |
News | RSS feeds and API | Real-time feed | Manually curated news sources, with data provided via a third-party provider and RSS feeds direct. |
Blogs | RSS feeds | Daily | Manually curated list, harvesting links to scholarly content. |
Mendeley | Mendeley API | Daily | Reader counts is number of readers with the output in their Library. Not included in score. |
Post-publication peer reviews | Publons API | Daily | Peer review comments collected from item records and associated by unique identifier. |
Reddit API | Daily | Includes all sub-reddits. Original posts only, no comments. | |
Wikipedia | Wikipedia API | Real-time feed | Mentions of scholarly outputs collected from References section. English Wikipedia only. |
Q&A (Stack Overflow) | Stack Overflow API | Daily | Scan for links to scholarly outputs. |
F1000Prime recommendations | F1000 API | Daily | Scan for links to scholarly outputs. |
YouTube | YouTube API | Daily | Scan for links to scholarly outputs in video descriptions. |
Open Syllabus | Static import from Open Syllabus | Last update September 2016 | Link syllabi's contents to HLOM IDs. |
Web of Science Citations | Clarivate Analytics API | Real-time feed | Citation counts from peer-reviewed literature. Not included in score. Appear in the Explorer for customers with existing Web of Science subscriptions. |
Dimensions Citations | Dimensions API | Daily | Match outputs based on scholarly IDs. |
Patent Citations | Static import from Dimensions | Last update October 2018 | Scanning JSON patent records for links to publications and DOIs. |