Altmetric supports the ability to export individual mentions from the Explorer. That means you can download a spreadsheet with information and links relating to individual news stories, policy documents, and other posts that have mentioned your research outputs. This advanced functionality allows users to investigate and evaluate qualitative attention data, by reviewing the mentions themselves.
How do I export mentions data?
Begin by creating a research output search query and then going to the Mentions Tab.
On the Mentions Tab, you can further refine your mention filters: for example, you can filter mention results by attention source (e.g., News, Policy Documents), mention timeframe (e.g., mentioned between 1st January and 30th November 2013).
Note that it is important to filter your mentions to be more specific, as you will only be able to export up to 1,000,000 rows in your CSV spreadsheet for mentions. (If you need to export more mentions, you may wish to use the Explorer API instead.)
Once you’ve filtered your mention results, you can then export the mentions by clicking on the button that says “Export this tab” and select "Download results as CSV". The spreadsheet will begin downloading immediately.
Opening your CSV spreadsheet file in Microsoft Excel
In some countries, Microsoft Excel may default to using a different separator (e.g., a semi-colon) to parse the CSV spreadsheet. However, in order to correctly view the files exported from Altmetric Explorer, you will need to ensure that you are using commas as separators.
Additionally, Excel may truncate numeric IDs (such as the X /Twitter User ID in the 'Outlet or Mention Author' column and the Post/Tweet ID in the 'External Mention ID' column). This can result in data loss, as the numeric IDs will not be accurate.
To ensure that your CSV spreadsheet file can be correctly opened in Microsoft Excel, please follow these steps:
Open Microsoft Excel and create a new spreadsheet.
Use the Import data feature, which allows you to choose the character used to split the columns and edit some other import settings.
Make sure that you select 'comma' as the separator.
Also ensure that the 'Outlet or Mention Author' and 'External Mention ID' columns are formatted as text, rather than as numbers, to ensure that no data are lost.