Altmetric monitors a range of non-traditional sources, searching for links and references to published research.
To be able to track the online attention for a specific piece of research, there are three things we need:
an output (research as in journal article or dataset)
an identifier attached to the output (e.g. DOI, ISBN or handle)
mentions of the output in the attention sources we track
Once we’ve picked up a mention of the research, we collate it together with any other online attention we’ve seen for that item and display it via the Altmetric Details Page, along with it’s own unique badge (donut) and automatically calculated Altmetric Attention Score.
These data are also captured in our platform the Altmetric Explorer, which 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.
The unique identifier is really important for us to be able to match the attention to the research – otherwise we don’t know which mentions belong to which research.