Attention sources update frequency and collection methods
The table below describes the process for collecting data, update frequency and any additional details across all of Altmetric's tracked sources.
Source | Collection | frequency | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Bluesky | data provider API | Real-time feed | Original posts and reposts |
Blogs | RSS feeds | Daily | Manually curated list, harvesting links to scholarly content. |
Clinical Guidelines | PDFs collected and scanned from sources | Varies by source (min. monthly updates) | PDFs of clinical guidelines documents are scanned for links to supported domains, as well as textual references to research which are resolved to identifiers where possible. |
Dimensions Citations | Dimensions API | Daily | Match outputs based on scholarly IDs. |
Facebook API | Daily | Posts on public Facebook Pages only, with prioritised popular Pages. | |
Mendeley | Mendeley API | Daily | Reader counts is number of readers with the output in their Library. Not included in score. |
News | RSS feeds and API | Real-time feed | Manually curated news sources, with data provided via a third-party provider as well as RSS feeds. References are extracted via text-mining and links. |
Patent Citations | Import from Dimensions | Fortnightly | Scanning JSON patent records for links to publications and DOIs. |
Peer reviews | Publons API | Daily | Peer review comments collected from item records and associated by unique identifier. |
Podcasts | RSS feeds | Real-time for top 1,000 podcasts by mentions; monthly for others | Scan for links to scholarly outputs in episode descriptions. |
Policy documents | PDFs collected and scanned from policy sources and repositories | Varies by source (min monthly updates) | PDFs of policy documents are scanned for links to supported domains, as well as textual references to research which are resolved to identifiers where possible. |
Q&A (Stack Exchange) | Stack Exchange API | Daily | Scan for links to scholarly outputs. |
Reddit API | Daily | Includes all sub-reddits: original posts and comments linking to a research output. | |
Seminars | Cassyni API | Daily | Only outputs included in a seminar's references list are tracked, not the audio, video or transcript content. |
Wikipedia | Wikipedia API | Real-time feed | Mentions of scholarly outputs collected from References section in Article pages. |
X | Third party data provider API | Real-time feed | Demographics, support for retweets, with monitoring of suspicious activity. |
YouTube | YouTube API | Daily | Scan for links to scholarly outputs in video descriptions. |