Altmetric uses a number of terms to describe our service and tools. This is a guide to some of those terms and how they are used:

Altmetric Attention Score

Weighted count of all of the online attention Altmetric have found for an individual research output. This includes mentions in public policy documents and references in Wikipedia, the mainstream news, social networks, blogs and more. This is the number that appears in the badges.

Altmetric Details Page

Altmetric create a record in our database, known as the Altmetric Details Page, for all output with tracked attention. This page presents the Altmetric Attention Score along with a detailed list of mentions, sources and demographics data. 

Altmetric Explorer

The Altmetric Explorer is our online platform. The Explorer allows users to browse by author, group or department, benchmark against peer organizations, report on the outcomes of outreach activity, and integrate the insights the data provides into evaluation and review processes.

Attention Sources (or non-traditional sources)

Altmetric track a unique range of online sources to capture the conversations relating to research outputs

We monitor the sources for mentions of research outputs to bring you the most relevant and up to date picture of the online activity and discussion.

API

We offer two different APIs (application programming interface). The Explorer API is optimized for exporting directlty from the Altmetric Explorer and the Details Page API is optimized for retrieving metadata, mention counts by source, and mentions, for individual research outputs.

Badge (or donut)

The badges provide a colourful, distinctive and instantly recognisable visualisation to help showcase the wider influence and dissemination of your published content. Each badge gives your website visitors one-click access to the collated record of online attention for each piece of research, where they can browse all of the original mentions and shares associated with it.

Citation

Refers to an academic citation of a research output, e.g. sourced from Dimensions. Distinct from a mention or post (see below).

Mention

A post published in one of our attention sources that discusses a specific research output. All the mentions are then collected in the Explorer as well as on the research output details page.

Output

A research output, e.g journal article, book or data set.

Post

Also referred to as a mention, a post contains attention to a research output, e.g. a blog post discussing a journal article.