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.

 

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. 

 

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. 

 

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 5000 English and non-English global news outlets. 

 

Blogs 

 

We maintain a manually curated list of over 15,000 academic and non-academic blogs. These are tracked automatically via RSS feeds. More information about blogs can be found here.

 

Online reference managers

 

Peer-review forums

  • Publons

  • Historical data: PubPeer - We no longer pick up reviews from PubPeer but you will still see the historical mentions on details pages.

 

Social media

  • X (public posts, quotes and reposts only, no favourites)       

  • Facebook (posts on a curated list of public Pages only, no individual profiles, no groups and no likes)

  • Reddit (original posts titles 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.

  • Historical data: Sina Weibo - Policies now prevent us from retrieving data.

 

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.

 

 

Other online sources


Coverage dates

Please refer to the article Attention Sources coverage dates to learn more about the coverage dates for each source.