The table below describes the process for collecting data, update frequency and any additional details across all of Altmetric's tracked sources.
Source name | Collection method | Update frequency | Notes |
X | Third party data provider API | Real-time feed | Demographics, support for retweets, with monitoring of suspicious activity. |
Facebook API | Daily | Posts on public Facebook Pages only, with prioritised popular Pages. | |
Policy documents | PDFs collected and scanned from policy sources and repositories | Varies by policy 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. |
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. |
Blogs | RSS feeds | Daily | Manually curated list, harvesting links to scholarly content. |
Mendeley | Mendeley API | Daily | Reader counts is number of readers with the output in their Library. Not included in score. |
Post-publication peer reviews | Publons API | Daily | Peer review comments collected from item records and associated by unique identifier. |
Reddit API | Daily | Includes all sub-reddits. Original posts only, no comments. | |
Wikipedia | Wikipedia API | Real-time feed | Mentions of scholarly outputs collected from References section in Article pages. English, Swedish, and Finnish Wikipedia only. |
Q&A (Stack Exchange) | Stack Exchange API | Daily | Scan for links to scholarly outputs. |
F1000Prime recommendations | F1000 API | Daily | Scan for links to scholarly outputs. |
YouTube | YouTube API | Daily | Scan for links to scholarly outputs in video descriptions. |
Open Syllabus | Static import from Open Syllabus | Last update December 2015 | Link syllabi's contents to HLOM IDs. |
Web of Science Citations | Clarivate Analytics API | Real-time feed | Citation counts from peer-reviewed literature. Not included in score. Appear in the Explorer for customers with existing Web of Science subscriptions. |
Dimensions Citations | Dimensions API | Daily | Match outputs based on scholarly IDs. |
Patent Citations | Static import from Dimensions | Last update May 2020 | Scanning JSON patent records for links to publications and DOIs. |