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 12+ 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 metrics and links to mentions to CSV
Altmetric Details Page API – Counts Only	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
Altmetric Details Page API – Counts Only, with API 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 snapshot (JSON)	Intended to be downloaded locally in order to run high-volume, complex queries and analyses 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 links to and snippets 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 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 counts and links to and snippets 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.

 

Resources for scientometrics researchers

All researchers

• New to analyzing Altmetric data? Check out Using Altmetric data for altmetrics research to understand your options
• Ready to publish your Altmetric-related study? Read this guide on How to cite and describe Altmetric data in publications
• Need funding to complete your altmetrics-related research? Check out the Altmetric annual research grant, which awards up to $2,000 each spring.

Explorer users

• Researchers using Explorer for their data retrieval should review this Introduction to using Altmetric Explorer
• Explorer users can query up to 25,000 identifiers at once using Advanced Search in Altmetric Explorer

API and database snapshot users

• API users and database snapshot users should check out the Altmetric Details Page API documentation and Full Access API example to see which fields are available for retrieval and analysis
• Researchers have developed some nice packages for using the Altmetric Details Page API, including rAltmetric (R), PyAltmetric (Python), and altmetric (Ruby). Altmetric API keys are required to work with these packages. Note that these packages are not developed nor maintained by Altmetric; please contact the packages’ respective owners for more information or to report bugs.

 

Research on Altmetric data

Curious about the research done on Altmetric data? To find the latest research on altmetrics, visit Dimensions. Here are some of our favorite studies.

Title	Journal	Year	Authors	DOI	Altmetric Attention Score	Times cited	FCR
Academic information on Twitter: A user survey	PLoS ONE	2018	Mohammadi, Ehsan; Thelwall, Mike; Kwasny, Mary; Holmes, Kristi L.	10.1371/journal.pone.0197265	336	2	0
Conservation Research Is Not Happening Where It Is Most Needed	PLoS Biology	2016	Wilson, Kerrie A.; Auerbach, Nancy A.; Sam, Katerina; Magini, Ariana G.; St. L. Moss, Alexander; Langhans, Simone D.; Budiharta, Sugeng; Terzano, Dilva; Meijaard, Erik	10.1371/journal.pbio.1002413	287	29	21.77
Tracking the digital footprints to scholarly articles from social media	Scientometrics	2016	Wang, Xianwen; Fang, Zhichao; Guo, Xinhui	10.1007/s11192-016-2086-z	90	4	2.9
Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective	Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology	2015	Costas, Rodrigo; Zahedi, Zohreh; Wouters, Paul	10.1002/asi.23309	141	193	104.24
Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers: The Effect of Document Properties and Collaboration Patterns	PLoS ONE	2015	Haustein, Stefanie; Costas, Rodrigo; Larivière, Vincent	10.1371/journal.pone.0120495	140	97	52.39
Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature	Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology	2014	Haustein, Stefanie; Peters, Isabella; Sugimoto, Cassidy R.; Thelwall, Mike; Larivière, Vincent	10.1002/asi.23101	272	140	58.74
Study points to press releases as sources of hype	Nature	2014	Woolston, Chris	10.1038/nature.2014.16551	108	2	0
How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of ‘alternative metrics’ in scientific publications	Scientometrics	2014	Zahedi, Zohreh; Costas, Rodrigo; Wouters, Paul	10.1007/s11192-014-1264-0	68	156	65.46
An open investigation of the reproducibility of cancer biology research	eLife	2014	Errington, Timothy M; Iorns, Elizabeth; Gunn, William; Tan, Fraser Elisabeth; Lomax, Joelle; Nosek, Brian A	10.7554/elife.04333	98	116	16.52
Using altmetrics for assessing research impact in the humanities	Scientometrics	2014	Hammarfelt, Björn	10.1007/s11192-014-1261-3	6	66	126.16