Researcher Data Access Program

Free access for university researchers

• Altmetric data is available free of charge to university-affiliated scientometrics researchers studying relevant topics
• Six months’ access available for one-off research projects.
• Individual support from Altmetric data scientists provided via email and in monthly Office Hours
• 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

• 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

To find the latest research on altmetrics, visit our sister company, 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