Research guides: Altmetrics: Altmetric.com

About Altmetric.com

As a provider of altmetric data, Altmetric.com:

Monitors online attention to scholarly articles
Offers altmetric data at the article and institutional levels
Visualizes data by gathering all of the source mentions into one score via the Altmetric donut visual shown here:

Article-level Data

Altmetric.com's Altmetric Bookmarklet

The Altmetric Bookmarklet is a free browser plug-in compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. This tool allows you to quickly and easily pull up altmetric data on articles as you view them in your browser.

Note: an article must have a DOI and Google Scholar friendly citation metadata for the Bookmarklet to access its altmetric data.

The following screenshot shows the Altmetric Bookmarklet in action. When reading an article, click on the “Altmetric it!” button on your bookmarks bar to open a pop-up window that contains the Altmetric.com donut and score, as well as a list of the different types of mentions the article has received.

For more information on the Altmetric Bookmarklet, see the Finding Altmetric Data section of this guide.

Badges for Researchers

Altmetric.com also allows researchers to add Altmetric badges to their personal webpages. Displaying the Altmetric.com donut alongside your publications list illustrates the influence of your work and provides links to more information on where your work is being discussed.

Visit the Altmetric.com Free Badges for Individual Researchers page to learn more about how to choose a badge style and embed the code into the html of your own page.

In the following example, the John S. Fossey research group from the University of Birmingham have used Altmetric.com donut badges to add article-level altmetric data their publications list.

Institutional-level Data

Altmetric.com also produces altmetric data and tools at the institutional level.

Altmetric Explorer for Institutions

Altmetric Explorer for Institutions (also known as Altmetric for Institutions) allows an institution to search and measure online conversations about publications by their affiliated researchers.

For example, organizations can view an overall summary of the mentions of their articles, top articles by Altmetric.com score and Tweets by country. For each paper listed, the user can drill down to the composition of the Altmetric.com score, and see the activity for the individual paper.

Universities such as the University of Cambridge, University of Manchester, Duke University, University of South Australia and ETH Zurich have explored Altmetric for Institutions to capture a snapshot of online attention to researchers' publications. Learn more about the Manchester experience, other institutions, and Altmetrics in higher education institutions: Three case studies.

This product is subscription-based; the University of Waterloo does not currently subscribe to this resource.

Institutional Repository Badges

Altmetric.com also offers free institutional repository badges that can be used to add altmetric data to publications held in an institution's repository.

To see how institutional repository badges work in action, see these examples from the University of Zurich and the University of Southampton.