Researcher Data Access Program

Supporting the scientometrics community

Altmetric is committed to helping others drive forward the field of altmetrics research through investigating our data. That’s why we offer our data free of charge to those who wish to understand patterns in scholarly communication across the Web.

Data access is granted only for one-time, limited duration research projects. If you are interested in using our data for evaluative purposes, including for building dashboards, please check out our products listing.

Researchers who wish to enroll in the Researcher Data Access Program must agree to a number of terms (described fully in the Program application form), including making one’s work Open Access, abiding by our official branding guidelines and attribution requirements, and sharing resulting presentations and publications with Altmetric.

Before requesting access, please learn more below about what information our data does and does not include.

We offer free access in several formats suited to all levels of technical expertise.

Available data formats

All of the following data formats include mention data from the 9+ million research outputs we’ve found mentions for online, to date.

Type	Conditions of use	What can I do with it?
Altmetric Explorer	For researchers working on a specific academic, one-off project Must give attribution to Altmetric when using data, let Altmetric know what project you’re working on with the data and provide updates	Run queries in a database on keywords in output titles and abstracts, journal titles, PubMed terms, publisher names, publication dates, and mention timeframes Search up to 25,000 output identifiers or journal ISSNs at once Visualize mentions over time and user demographics Search for full-text mentions in particular attention sources Export to CSV
Free API	For researchers working on a specific academic, one-off project Must give attribution to Altmetric when using data, let Altmetric know what project you’re working on with the data and provide updates Must have prior experience working with APIs	Run programmatic queries and retrieve counts of mentions from each source tracked by Altmetric. Rate limited to 1 query/second. Best used in instances where samples are pre-defined, as API calls require output identifiers or desired timeframes and data sources. Best suited for individuals with programming experience.
Free API with a key	For researchers working on a specific academic, one-off project Must give attribution to Altmetric when using data, let Altmetric know what project you’re working on with the data and provide updates Must have prior experience working with APIs	Run queries and retrieve counts of mentions from each source tracked by Altmetric. No rate limits. Best used in instances where samples are pre-defined, as API calls require output identifiers or desired timeframes and data sources. Best suited for individuals with programming experience.
Raw database (JSON)	For researchers working on a specific academic, one-off project Must give attribution to Altmetric when using data, let Altmetric know what project you’re working on with the data and provide updates Must have extensive prior experience working with JSON	Run queries and retrieve full text of mentions (excluding Tweets due to licensing restrictions). Allows for faster, local data processing (as compared to API data retrieval). Best suited for individuals with extensive programming experience.
Custom data retrieval ($)	Because of the development resources involved in retrieving custom data, we charge for this service (at-cost) For researchers working on a specific academic, one-off project Must give attribution to Altmetric when using data, let Altmetric know what project you’re working on with the data and provide updates	For Explorer data: CSV exports of counts and full-text mention data for queries based on keywords in output titles and abstracts, journal titles, PubMed terms, publisher names, publication dates, and mention timeframes. Suited for those without programming experience. For JSON data: Run programmatic queries and retrieve full text of mentions (excluding Tweets due to licensing restrictions). Allows for faster, local data processing (as compared to API data retrieval). Best suited for individuals with programming experience.

 

What does the data include?

Altmetric tracks detailed metrics and mentions for discussions of research outputs (e.g. datasets, journal articles, monographs) on the Web. We capture all mentions where a research output with a compatible persistent identifier and adequate metadata has been linked to in any of the sources we track. The bulk of our data contains mentions from 2011 onward. For more details on our data collection practices, please visit our knowledge base.

What doesn’t the data include?

Our data does not include social media topics and hashtags unless they are associated with discrete research outputs. We also do not track downloads and pageviews, due to concerns over data reliability.

Apply for the Researcher Data Access Program

We’d love to know more about your project and see if Altmetric would be a good fit to answer your research questions. To apply to join the Researcher Data Access Program, please email info@altmetric.com for more information.