How does Altmetric track attention to books?

 

Altmetric tracks attention to books on content that is identified by ISBN (International Standard Book Number). When a link to a book hosted on a supported domain is shared across a source of attention, we collect the details and record the mention in Altmetric.

 

How to ensure a book is tracked by Altmetric?

 

There are three essential steps to ensure a book is tracked:

  1. The book needs to be hosted on a publisher domain that is whitelisted 

  2. The book must have a unique identifier

  3. The book needs a landing page with good metadata

 

1. Whitelisted domains

 

For Altmetric to be able to track the content on a website, we first need to add the website domain to our tracking database. If you would like your book content to be tracked by Altmetric, contact us to discuss the process at support@altmetric.com.

 

2. Unique identifiers

 

For books to be trackable they must have unique identifiers. These identifiers can be:

 

  • An ISBN. This will require our team to build a special module that will allow our system to capture the data from the book page.

    or

  • A DOI registered with Crossref. In this case, Crossref will assign an ISBN through their system and we won’t need to build a special module to be able to track the book. The book will appear a standard publication in our database.



For a book to be categorised as a "book, with book chapters, in our database or for cover images to be displayed a special custom module is required.



 

3. Metadata

 

As with any other output, the identifier must be embedded in <meta> tags, to make sure we can collect the information. Having an identifier available solely on the front end is not enough for us to collect the data.

 

Examples of meta tags for ISBN 9780822370727:

 

    <meta name="citation_isbn" content="9780822370727" >

 

More metadata is better! More detailed metadata improves the bibliographic information for the record of your research held in the Altmetric database, and enhances the online visibility across search indexes and services such as Google Scholar. For these reasons, we recommend adding as many of the supported meta tags. You can find detailed information about metadata here.