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DRAFT: 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:

 The Altmetric Donut is a colorful circle with an altmetric score displayed inside. The score here is 137.

Data Sources

Altmetric.com uses data from sources such as:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Blogs
  • Mainstream news media
  • Public policy documents
  • Patents
  • And more!

Visit Altmetric.com for a full list of their data sources.

Video: Introduction to Altmetric.com

This video from Altmetric.com describes their approach to collecting altmetric data. (YouTube video 02:16)

Article-level Data

Altmetric Bookmarklet

Install this free tool from Altmetric.com on your Chrome, Firefox, or Safari browser to view article-level altmetric data from PubMed, arXiv, and other articles with DOIs.

This screenshot shows the Altmetric Bookmarklet in action:

Bookmarklet button appears on top right of screen. Under this, a small pop-up shows the altmetric donut, article score, and where mentions were found

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.

Screenshot shows research group's website. Each publication in their list has an altmetric donut and score beside it

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. 

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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.