Altmetric badges allow you to add altmetrics data to your content with a minimum of fuss and technical effort – all you need to do is add two lines of code to your HTML. We host the altmetrics data that your readers will see, but give you control over their presentation.

 

The process involves three essential steps:

  1. Ensure Altmetric tracks your domain

  2. Ensure you have scholarly identifiers and metadata on each of your article page

  3. Add the badge code to your pages

 

1. Ensure Altmetric tracks your domain

 

To properly track your content, we need to know the domain names on which you’ll be using the badges: e.g. stmpublisher.com, repository.university.edu.

 

For publishers: if any journals on your platform have their own custom domains, e.g., myjournal.com, please tell us about those too by contacting us . 

 

2. Ensure you have scholarly identifiers and metadata on each of your article page

 

Scholarly identifiers

 

In order to disambiguate mentions of articles, we look for identifiers such as DOIs, PubMed IDs and arXiv IDs in your content. If the research outputs are hosted on your own website, to make sure we can track each of the publications, you’ll need to have scholarly identifiers assigned to them. You’ll also need to make sure that each research output has its own landing page.

 

You can find the list of the scholarly identifiers we support here.

 

Metadata and meta-tags

 

Once each research output has been assigned a scholarly identifier, you’ll need to add metadata to each research output landing page, in their header.

 

To ensure we can do this easily, it helps if you follow Google Scholar’s “Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters” specifically adding meta-tags with DOIs or PubMed IDs.

 

Examples of the most common meta-tags for scholarly identifiers:

 

<meta name="citation_doi" content="10.1234/journal123">

<meta name="citation_pmid" content="1234">

<meta name="citation_arxiv_id" content="12345">

<div class="altmetric-embed" data-handle="10255/dryad.40269"></div>

 

We also look for meta-tags specific to certain repository software such as Bepress like so:

 

<meta name="bepress_citation_doi" content="10.1234/journal123">

 

And, if your platform doesn’t allow you to specify data- attributes, you can also use CSS classes instead like so:

 

<div class="altmetric-embed altmetric-badge-type-donut altmetric-badge-popover-left altmetric-doi-10.5339/connect.2012.9"></div>

 

Supported meta-tags:

 

Value

Meta tags

DOI (unique identifier)

  • citation_doi

  • Doi

  • DC.Identifier

  • DC.DOI

  • DC.Identifier.DOI

  • DOIs

  • bepress_citation_doi

  • rft_id

PubMed ID (unique identifier)

  • citation_pmid

arXiv ID (unique identifier)

  • citation_arxiv_id

SSRNs (unique identifier)

  • citation_abstract_html_url

ISBN (unique identifier)

  • citation_isbn

Authors

  • citation_author

  • bepress_citation_author

  • DC.creator

Article title

  • DC.title

  • citation_title

ISSN

  • citation_issn

  • bepress_citation_issn

Journal title

  • citation_journal_title

  • bepress_citation_journal_title

Journal issue

  • citation_issue

Journal volumes

  • citation_volume

Publishers

  • citation_publisher

  • bepress_citation_publisher

Publication dates

  • citation_online_date

  • bepress_citation_online_date

PDF URLs

  • citation_pdf_url

  • bepress_citation_pdf_url

 

3. Add the badge code to your pages

 

You can find complete instructions on using our embeddable badge code and an interactive tool to build your own snippet here. 

 

What if I want a richer integration and access to the underlying data?

 

If you want to develop against the raw Altmetric API rather than using the embeddable badges then please get in touch with us to request an API key.