Researcher Data Access Program

Free access to Altmetric data to study how research is shared and communicated online

Free access for university researchers

  • Altmetric data is available free of charge to university-affiliated scientometrics researchers studying relevant topics
  • One year access available for one-off, noncommercial research projects.
  • Special consideration for International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics members

Available data formats

Type Conditions of use What can I do with it? 
Altmetric Explorer
  • Give Altmetric attribution in your paper or presentation
  • Share project updates with Altmetric
  • Search for 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
  • Export metrics and links to mentions to CSV
Altmetric Details Page API – Counts Only
  • Give Altmetric attribution in your paper or presentation
  • Share project updates with Altmetric
  • Must have prior experience working with APIs
  • Run programmatic queries
  • Retrieve counts of the number of users who have mentioned a particular output within each source tracked by Altmetric.
  • Retrieve other metadata and metrics for a particular research output (read the Details Page API documentation)
  • No rate limit with API key
  • Best used in instances where samples are pre-defined, as API calls require output identifiers or desired timeframes and data sources
Altmetric Details Page API – Full Access
  • Give Altmetric attribution in your paper or presentation
  • Share project updates with Altmetric
  • Must have prior experience working with APIs
  • Only available to those with an API key
  • Run programmatic queries
  • Retrieve counts of unique users and number of  posts about a specific research output from each source tracked by Altmetric.
  • Retrieve other metadata and metrics for a particular research output (read the “fetch” Details Page API documentation)
  • No rate limits.
  • Best used in instances where samples are pre-defined, as API calls require output identifiers or desired timeframes and data sources

 

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.

Request access

To apply for free Altmetric access, please tell us about your research. We’ll review your application (with an aim to respond within 10 business days) and let you know if Altmetric would be a good fit to answer your research questions.

 

Resources

All researchers

Explorer users

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

To find the latest research on altmetrics, visit our sister company, Dimensions. Here are some of our favorite studies.

TitleJournal YearAuthorsDOIAltmetric Attention ScoreTimes citedFCR
Academic information on Twitter: A user surveyPLoS ONE2018Mohammadi, Ehsan; Thelwall, Mike; Kwasny, Mary; Holmes, Kristi L.10.1371/journal.pone.019726533620
Conservation Research Is Not Happening Where It Is Most NeededPLoS Biology2016Wilson, Kerrie A.; Auerbach, Nancy A.; Sam, Katerina; Magini, Ariana G.; St. L. Moss, Alexander; Langhans, Simone D.; Budiharta, Sugeng; Terzano, Dilva; Meijaard, Erik10.1371/journal.pbio.10024132872921.77
Tracking the digital footprints to scholarly articles from social mediaScientometrics2016Wang, Xianwen; Fang, Zhichao; Guo, Xinhui10.1007/s11192-016-2086-z9042.9
Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspectiveJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology2015Costas, Rodrigo; Zahedi, Zohreh; Wouters, Paul10.1002/asi.23309141193104.24
Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers: The Effect of Document Properties and Collaboration PatternsPLoS ONE2015Haustein, Stefanie; Costas, Rodrigo; Larivière, Vincent10.1371/journal.pone.01204951409752.39
Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literatureJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology2014Haustein, Stefanie; Peters, Isabella; Sugimoto, Cassidy R.; Thelwall, Mike; Larivière, Vincent10.1002/asi.2310127214058.74
Study points to press releases as sources of hypeNature2014Woolston, Chris10.1038/nature.2014.1655110820
How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of ‘alternative metrics’ in scientific publicationsScientometrics2014Zahedi, Zohreh; Costas, Rodrigo; Wouters, Paul10.1007/s11192-014-1264-06815665.46
An open investigation of the reproducibility of cancer biology researcheLife2014Errington, Timothy M; Iorns, Elizabeth; Gunn, William; Tan, Fraser Elisabeth; Lomax, Joelle; Nosek, Brian A10.7554/elife.043339811616.52
Using altmetrics for assessing research impact in the humanitiesScientometrics2014Hammarfelt, Björn10.1007/s11192-014-1261-3666126.16