What are missed mentions?

 

Missed mentions are mentions of research outputs across our tracked attention sources that match our tracking requirements and should have been automatically picked up by our system but have been missed. 

 

Our policy is to manually add mentions that should have been picked up automatically if we are notified about them. These missed mentions will be added to their respective tab on the output details page and will contribute to the Altmetric Attention Score.

 

Why are mentions missed?

 

There are a few reasons why mentions of research outputs are not always automatically picked up by Altmetric:

 

  • The mention did not include a working link to a page with the research output identifier (e.g. the DOI), so it couldn’t be picked up automatically by our software - this sometimes happens with blog posts, or if a link has been added to a news story after it is first published (we only scan them once).

  • The text mining system (which we use for news and policy only), was not able to match a research output to the story by identifying the journal title and author name.

  • We weren’t tracking the source when the mention was published. To track a news source we need to index it in our database. To track blog posts they need to have a working RSS feed. 

  • All attention must be available and open. Altmetric cannot track sources that are behind a login or a paywall. 

  • The mention included a link to another news story or press page about the research, rather than to the research itself. These are known as second order citations, which we don’t track.

  • The mention was in a comment rather than in the original post or article.

 

 

Reporting missed mentions

 

Before reporting missed mentions, please ensure that these mentions are technically trackable by checking our article How are mentioned collected? or by visiting the section about our attention sources.

 

If you have found a missed mention of your research that you would like to notify us about, please complete this form.

 

You can also suggest a source to be tracked by completing this form.