How to share your work online

You’ve just published your research online – congratulations! Whether you’ve posted a preprint, uploaded a data set to a repository, or reached the end of the peer review journey and seen your article go online, you’re probably excited to share your work with the world.

Altmetric can start tracking attention to your research as soon as it goes online! To ensure that Altmetric captures your mentions, it helps to understand how we track attention to research.

This diagram illustrates how Altmetric picks up mentions and links them with our details pages for individual publications:

1. A link to a published research output is shared on a platform that Altmetric tracks (such as Twitter)
2. If Altmetric tracks the domain being shared (like plos.org), our servers follow the link to the publication’s landing page
3. Altmetric’s scrapers look for a valid scholarly identifier on that page, such as a DOI, PubMed ID, or handle
4. Our database uses that identifier to match the mention with the publication’s Altmetric details page

To ensure that Altmetric captures the online attention to your research, follow these simple guidelines.

Make sure Altmetric tracks the platform where you’re sharing your research

Altmetric tracks news sources from all over the world, social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit, Wikipedia, over 14,000 blogs, and loads of other sources where research is frequently mentioned.

While some sources, like Twitter, are always tracked automatically, others are manually curated. Our data curation team adds new YouTube channels, blogs, news sources, and public Facebook pages every day.

Promoting your publication on a unique platform like your own YouTube channel or blog is a great way to foster conversations about your research.

If you have your own blog, public Facebook page, or YouTube channel where you would like to share your research and you’re not sure whether we are tracking it already, get in touch with us at [email protected] and we can make sure it’s added!

Include a link to the original source of the publication

Altmetric relies on identifiers to match up mentions with particular publications, so it’s important that when you share your research, you link to a page that includes a scholarly identifier. Some of the identifiers we use to track content include:

• DOIs
• PubMed IDs
• ISBNs
• Handles
• arXiv IDs
• Clinical Trial IDs

Your best bet is always to include a link to the journal or other platform page where the publication was originally posted. The link you include just needs to lead to the content you’ve published with a valid identifier (like a DOI), and that identifier needs to be embedded properly in the page’s meta tags.

Example: Citing research on Wikipedia

Millions of people access Wikipedia each day for basic knowledge on all manner of subjects, so incorporating your new research into Wikipedia is a really useful way of sharing knowledge. Properly citing research on Wikipedia is important and, fortunately, pretty easy!

To add a new Wikipedia citation, click the “edit” button on any subheading. Place your cursor at the end of the sentence where you would like to add your citation and select “Cite” in the visual editor.

Using the Automatic option, you’ll be prompted to include a URL or identifier for the item you’d like to cite:

When you hit “Generate,” the full citation should populate in the proper format:

Once you hit “Insert” and save your changes, the mention will be picked up by Altmetric!

Watch the attention to your publication grow!

Sharing your research on your own platforms is one great way to start conversations within your network. Once you’ve started sharing your publication, keep track of who else is talking about your work using one of our tools for researchers.