In general

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 newspapers 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, but we know there are plenty of sites that we should track and just haven't gotten round to yet. If you know of any please do let us know with the feedback option or by email.

Research outputs 

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 

You can check out the news sources page on the Altmetric website for the latest list of news sources that we track. This list currently extends to over 2,900 English and non-English global news outlets.    

3) Blogs 

We maintain a manually curated list of over 14,000 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
• Publons   

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:

1. WO : World Intellectual Property Organization

2. AU : IP Australia

3. DE : German Patent and Trade Mark Office

4. CH : Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property

5. EP : European Patent Office (EPO)

6. US : United States Patent and Trademark Office

7. FR : National Industrial Property Institute

8. GB : Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom

9. 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.