Getting Scholarly Conversations Instantly: Altmetric It!

The Altmetric Bookmarklet: a free and useful reading companion

People are talking about scholarly papers online, but what are they saying? And what digital tools are they using to communicate their ideas?

In this blog post, we’d like to introduce you to the Altmetric Bookmarklet, a free browser tool that lets you easily find out how much attention that recent papers have received online. The image on the left gives you an idea of the data that you’ll see. First, the Bookmarklet shows you the Altmetric donut, which is colour-coded according to which sources have mentioned the article. Inside the donut, you’ll see the Altmetric score of attention for the paper. The metrics are displayed below the donut: here, you can see how many times a paper has been mentioned in various sources, such as social media, mainstream news, and blogs (the altmetrics data). You can even see the number of readers who have saved the paper in their online reference managers.

With the Bookmarklet, you’ll also have a direct portal into the Altmetric article details page, on which you can find out exactly what has been said about the article.

If it’s a new paper or  just hasn’t seen much attention yet use the “Get email updates…” link in the bottom left hand side to sign up to an email alert whenever somebody mentions it online.

We reckon that the Bookmarklet is a really useful reading companion, especially for any academics who are interested in quickly seeing the attention that has been paid to their own articles.

Get the scholarly conversations with just one click

The Altmetric Bookmarklet is a browser add-on for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that is extremely simple to use. If you’re reading a scholarly article online and click the Bookmarklet’s “Altmetric It!” button, all of the altmetrics data for that paper will appear on the right side of the page.

To install the Bookmarklet, all you need to do is visit this page, drag the “Altmetric It” button to your bookmarks bar, and you’re all set. Watch the video walkthrough below.

Installation instructions and demo

The small print

At the moment, the Bookmarklet works only on PubMed, arXiv, or pages that contain a DOI (the Altmetric API handles other identifiers too, but we haven’t added this functionality to the bookmarklet yet). Furthermore Altmetric only started collecting data in mid-2011 any articles published before then will have patchy coverage: don’t expect to see everything!

By default, the Bookmarklet supports publishers who embed Google Scholar-friendly citation metadata. If a particular journal isn’t supported at the moment just let us know you’re keen to see it and we’ll add it to the bookmarklet development queue.

If no DOI is found but you can see one on the page reload, select the DOI (as if you were going to copy and paste it) and then hit the “Altmetric it” bookmarklet while the DOI is selected.

More generally if you have any issues installing the Bookmarklet, please refer to our Bookmarklet FAQ page.

We’d love to hear what you think of the Bookmarklet. Tweet us or e-mail us with your thoughts!