What is the Altmetric Attention Digest?
The Altmetric Attention Digest is an AI-powered feature designed to move beyond simple attention metrics and provide users with a clear, concise, and narrative summary of a research output's attention data.
It uses an AI model to synthesize information from various attention sources—including news, policy documents, social media, and citations—to create an on-demand, easily interpretable report on the research's influence.
Attention Digests will be available for research outputs with a minimum of 5 mentions (excluding mentions from discontinued sources).
Why is the Altmetric Attention Digest Useful?
The Digest addresses the challenge of making sense of complex attention data, enabling users to:
Quickly Grasp Impact: Instantly understand the significance of a research output's attention, saving time on manual analysis.
Identify Key Events: Highlight specific connected events or trigger points that led to notable surges in attention (e.g., a policy change or a press release).
Focus on Authority: Prioritize and synthesize information from key indicators of impact, such as policy documents, clinical guidelines, and prominent news media.
Facilitate Communication: Generate ready-to-share narratives for stakeholders, making it easy to convey the reach and influence of research for grant reports, tenure reviews, or internal strategy briefings.
Streamline Reporting: Provide a comprehensive, high-level summary that connects the quantitative metrics with the qualitative context.
The Digest is distinct from Sentiment Analysis. While Sentiment Analysis categorizes the tone (positive/negative), the Digest provides a narrative overview of what is being said, where, and when, focusing on building a coherent story of impact.
Altmetric Attention Digest in Details Pages
The Digest is an on-demand feature accessible from the Details Page of any research output.
Digest Generation and Display
Trigger: On the Details Page, Altmetric Explorer users will see a clear "Show Attention Digest" Call-to-Action (CTA) button, typically located near the main attention score breakdown.
On-Demand Process: When the CTA is clicked, the system initiates the process to generate the Digest. This process is resource-intensive and is limited to once per 24 hours per research output. If a Digest was generated within the last 24 hours by any user, subsequent users will be shown the cached version.
The system will only create a brand new Digest if the underlying attention data (eligible mentions) for the research output has changed since the last Digest was generated. This means you may see a Digest with a timestamp older than 24 hours if no new attention data has been recorded, and this Digest will be the most up-to-date summary of the existing data.
Display: The generated Digest appears in a pop-out drawer overlay on the Details Page.
Content Structure
The generated Digest follows a clear, hierarchical structure:
High-Level Narrative Summary: This initial paragraph provides a concise, overall summary of the research's impact, synthesizing the most notable events and attention highlights.
Source-Specific Insights: This section provides more detailed information, breaking down the impact by source type (e.g., News outlets, Policy documents). It includes:
Synthesized findings regarding attention from that source.
Specific examples or links back to notable mentions to enable verification.
Transparency and Footprint: The Digest is designed to incorporate a robust footprint where notable mentions have clear, accessible links back to their original sources. This enables users to verify the AI-generated information independently.
User feedback
When generating a Digest, you may see an option to provide feedback. This feedback helps us refine the AI model for more accurate content.
