Facebook tracking

 

Altmetric tracks public Facebook Pages only, meaning that there are a lot of Facebook pages that we cannot track such as personal profiles, private accounts or Group pages, due to data access restrictions. We manually curate tracked Facebook Pages, which are scanned for mentions of scholarly outputs.

 

Once a Facebook Page is indexed in our database, our system will scan the Facebook public wall and collect any future posts as long as they contain a direct link to a research output. The collection of Facebook posts is run on a weekly basis, with prioritised popular Pages. Please note that we do not track Likes, Shares or Comments.

 

How to ensure that Facebook mentions are picked up by Altmetric?

 

Make sure that:

  • Altmetric is tracking the public Facebook Page

  • Posts mentioning research outputs include the direct link to these outputs

 

Suggesting a new public Facebook Page to be indexed

 

You can suggest a new Page to be indexed to our database by completing this form. You’ll need to be able to provide the following information: 

  • Title of the Page

  • Homepage URL

 

Once we receive the form, our data curator will consider the public Facebook Page for inclusion in the Altmetric database. The process usually takes a week.

 

Facebook tab on an Altmetric Details Page

 

On an Altmetric Details Page, the Facebook tab lists Facebook posts mentioning that output by time of publication in descending order, with the most recent ones available at the top of the page. You can see which Page posted about the research output and the content of the post. 

The Facebook posts appear as dark blue in the Altmetric donut.