Sources of Attention
Altmetric track a unique range of online sources to capture the conversations relating to research outputs
Relevant, reliable and transparent
We monitor the following sources for mentions of research outputs to bring you the most relevant and up to date picture of the online activity and discussion:
Public policy documents
We track and text mine a range of public policy sources globally, looking for references to published research.
Mainstream media
Our mainstream media tracking offers a unique insight into where a piece of research has attracted high-profile coverage from over 2,000 outlets around the world. Click here to find out how we pick up mentions and view a list of all of the media outlets we track.
Online reference managers
Displayed on the details pages but not included in the Altmetric score are the number of Mendeley users who have saved the research to their library. You can view a breakdown of the demographics (location, discipline, etc) of these users on the summary tab details page.
Post-publication peer-review platforms
Also included in our coverage are evaluations of individual outputs from contributors to open post-publication peer-review forums Pubpeer and Publons.
Wikipedia
We currently track the English language version of Wikipedia for citations to published research, with new mentions or edits being identified automatically.
Open Syllabus Project
Data from the Open Syllabus Project is displayed on the details pages of individual books to showcase where those titles appear in the course syllabi of over 4,000 institutions around the world.
Blogs
Our system scans a manually curated list of over 9,000 academic and non-academic blogs every day.
Citations
We provide Scopus citation information in the Explorer for Publishers and Explorer for Institutions platforms for items that have also received attention from the other sources we track. Users of these platforms are able to view the 3 most recent citing articles in the Altmetric details page for the item, and click through to view all citing articles in Scopus.
Research highlights
Recommendations of individual research outputs from F1000.
Social Media
We track a range of social networks for mentions of research outputs – all of these are then displayed on the details page for complete transparency. Networks we track include:
– Facebook (mentions on public pages only)
– Twitter
– Google+
– LinkedIn, Sina Weibo and Pinterest (historical data only – they no longer supply an open feed)
Multimedia and other online platforms
We also monitor a selection of other sites and community forums:
– YouTube
– Reddit
– Q&A (stack overflow)
Our sources list is expanding all the time. Visit our knowledgebase for details of when we started tracking each type of source.
Got a new source you think we should be tracking?
Fill in the form below to let us know! We’ll take a look and add it if we can.
(Note that for blogs and mainstream media sites we need an RSS feed to be able to do this)