Below you will find the FAQs and troubleshooting for the Bookmarklet.


FAQs

 

What does it mean if the bookmarklet doesn't support a journal or no results are returned when clicking the bookmarklet

 

You'll see this if the bookmarklet isn't able to automatically extract a DOI from somewhere on the page or it isn't a tracked research output

 

It doesn't mean that Altmetric isn't tracking the articles in this journal: that's done by a separate server. However, until you select a DOI or we add support for the journal to the bookmarklet code you won't be able to get to the stats. If the output has a DOI please see the below.

 

No results or the bookmarklet says that it can't find a DOI on the page but I can see it right there under the title!

 

The bookmarklet looks for DOIs in the machine readable metadata of the web page you're on, but when that fails you can override it manually if the output page has a visible DOI.

 

Simply reload the page, highlight the DOI on the page (as if you were going to copy & paste it) then hit the Altmetric It bookmarklet again. The bookmarklet will then pull up details of the highlighted DOI instead of giving you an error.

 

The bookmarklet says that this article has 2 readers on Mendeley, but when I search for the title in Mendeley it comes back with 4. What gives?

 

Altmetric searches Mendeley for the article's DOI - the unique identifier given to the article by its publisher - rather than the title or other bibliographic metadata. 

 

Mendeley are generally pretty good about finding the DOI for a paper from its PDF but sometimes they aren't able to. When that happens it's possible to get multiple versions of the same paper in the Mendeley database and conflicting reader counts.

 

I'm using Internet Explorer / Opera, why doesn't it work?

 

Sorry! Right now the Bookmarklet will only work on Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

 

I'm not using Internet Explorer or Opera, but I'm still having trouble.

 

Drop us a line letting us know what browser and operating system you're using and what link you're trying the Bookmarklet out on.

 

What's the number in the middle of the donut graphic?

 

This is the Altmetric Attention score. The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the quantity and quality of attention that an article has received. Check out this description for more details.

 

Lots of articles score 0. What's the deal?

 

Unfortunately Altmetric can only pick up sharing activity from late 2011 onwards. It's also possible that Altmetric isn't tracking the journal correctly - though we try to cover as many titles as possible we've certainly missed some. Drop us a line if you think this might be the case.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that not every article is mentioned in social media, a newspaper, or a magazine, just like not every article is cited. In fact, the majority of articles published in 2012 / 2013 won't have a score over 0.

 

The actual percentage of articles with a non-zero Altmetric Attention Score varies depending on the field and specific journal. In general, high impact and open-access journals do better than paywalled or low impact journals.

 

I Posted on X about my paper prior to July 2011, but that doesn't turn up in the metrics. What gives?

 

Altmetric only started collecting data in July 2011, so the Bookmarklet works best on recent papers. You'll still see blog, Facebook and research highlight metrics about older articles but the number of X mentions will always be 0.

 

If you know there's recent activity around an article and it's not showing up then let us know.

 

I just blogged about an article. How long will it take to show up on the Bookmarklet?

 

X posts should show up within a couple of hours, but other sources can take up to a couple of days. Check back again later, and send an e-mail if the content is still not showing up. It could be that we aren't yet tracking your blog.

 

I keep seeing a "this journal isn't supported yet" message. What's going on?

 

To work properly, the Bookmarklet must be able to locate a unique identifier for the article you're on, typically a DOI. Not all publishers store the DOI of articles in a standard location, and so we have to add support for them on an individual basis. Furthermore, not all papers have DOIs, especially if they're more than 10 years old.

 

On the plus side, we're adding support for new journals all the time. Feel free to request support for specific journals.

 

Note for developers: even if the Bookmarklet doesn't support DOI lookup for a particular journal, the article level metrics data may still be available through the API.

 

Where do the data come from?

 

The article level metrics data are collected by Altmetric. The raw numbers are then made available for free - Altmetric sustains itself by selling more detailed data and analysis tools to publishers, institutions and academic societies.

 

Can I incorporate Altmetric data in my own app?

 

Yes! For most applications you can use the Altmetric API. Please do reach out to discuss your use case and, when necessary, ask for an API key for your app.