The Altmetric Explorer lets you easily perform rich analyses and generate reports for Altmetric attention data. After running a search query for research outputs, you can browse through the Explorer's analysis tools to view detailed demographics, attention over time, individual mentions, and more.


The Explorer tabs:

 

Please note that the content of the article below applies mainly to the Altmetric Explorer for Publishers and the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions. Users with access to the Free Explorer for Librarians will only be able to see the Research Outputs Tab.

 

 The Highlights Tab

The Highlights Tab shows you what’s popular and who’s engaging the most with your content. The Highlights Tab is the first page that you see when you log into the Altmetric Explorer, and summarizes essential data highlights for any search query that is run. This helps you to make better sense of the Altmetric data. This video provides more information about what you can see in the Highlights Tab.

 

On the Highlights Tab, interesting attention is brought to the forefront. Summaries and visualizations provide direction for further exploration within the platform: each data block links to another analysis tab in the Altmetric Explorer. See the sections below for more information on the analysis tabs in the Altmetric Explorer.



Setting a default search query to load upon login

 

If you wish to change the search query that loads every time you log in to the Altmetric Explorer and see the Highlights Tab, first run the desired search query and save it. From the Saved Searches panel, tick the box in the "Set default search" column next to the saved search of your choice. This will set the search query to appear the next time you load the Altmetric Explorer.

 

The Research Outputs Tab

The Research Outputs Tab displays the list of research outputs that are contained within a given search query.

 

 

The Timeline Tab

For any search query, the Timeline Tab lets you view all mentions over time, and filter by specific attention source types. You can select multiple attention sources to view in the chart by holding down the Command key on Mac computers, or the Control key on Windows computers.

 

If you wish to view the individual mentions contained within a specific timeframe, for any combination of attention sources, simply click on a bar in the chart. This will take you to the Mentions Tab, where you can view the mentions in that timeframe, and further refine your results by other parameters. See this article about the Mentions Tab for more information.

 

The Demographics Tab

In the Demographics Tab, you can see maps of geolocations for four attention sources: X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, News, and Policy. Each map shows the spread of attention around the world, applied for any search query. Counts for the number of mentions and mention authors (or outlets) by country are shown for each of the four attention sources.

 

If you click on the name of a country in the table, or the country itself on the map, you will be taken to the Mentions Tab, where you can view all of the mentions originating from that country in the selected attention source. See this article about the Mentions Tab for more information.

 

 

Note about our maps
The maps displayed in the Explorer and on the Detail Pages are provided by third-party libraries. In Explorer, we use Highcharts Maps, while on Detail Pages, we use Google GeoCharts. 
If there are concerns with these maps, we recommend reaching out to the respective organizations responsible for these libraries, as we rely heavily on the maps they supply.


The Mentions Tab

On the Mentions Tab, you can view all the individual mentions across all attention sources. Additionally, you can drill into specific time periods (e.g., to view all mentions that occurred during a particular week).


Mentions can be filtered by attention source type (e.g., X, news, etc.), mention outlet or author, country, and mention time.


The Mentions Tab also allows you to surface internationally recognized mainstream news attention in the "Show Highlights Only" option. Read more about all the powerful features contained within the Mentions Tab here.

 

 

The Mention Sources Tab (If available)

The Mention Sources Tab allows you to view and search by the attention source type and then view the mention counts associated with each source. You also have the option to view all the mentions associated with that source and the most recent mentions. This is available for News, Blog, Policy, X, Weibo (historic), Facebook, Google+ (Historic) and Reddit. You can also specify a time period and country to further refine your search. Availability of the Mention Sources tab is dependent on the Subscription in place.


The Journals Tab

The Journals Tab is a comparison table that displays all the total mention counts for different Altmetric attention sources, aggregated by journal. For example, if you were to run a search query for all research outputs published by a specific journal publisher, then you would see all their journals listed in this table, along with the mention counts for each source.

 

Within the Journals Tab, you can sort the entire table by any attention source by clicking on its column header: for example, you can sort the journals by total number of mentions, number of X mentions, number of policy mentions, and so on. With this table, you can easily see which journals (contained with any given search query) are performing strongly across specific sources. If your research output search query includes journals and custom collections (e.g., figshare), you will see them all listed in this table.