Altmetric.com
Altmetric.com is an altmetric aggregator, or harvester, that tracks a large number of sources for article mentions. Specifically, Altmetric.com tracks Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Mendeley, CiteULike, PubPeer, Publons, Reddit, Wikipedia, reviews on F1000, YouTube, mainstream news media, sites running Stack Exchange, and some policy documents.
Altmetric.com is a subscription service. While Western Libraries does not subscribe to this service, there are some free access points.
- The Altmetric It! bookmarklet is a free tool that searches webpages for DOIs, and retrieves Altmetric.com data for those DOIs.
Video example from Altmetric.com about the Altmetric It! bookmarklet
- Many publishers embed Altmetric.com “badges” on their website. Authors can check publisher websites to see if they make use of this service.
Altmetric.com badge example from publisher's website - Scholarship@Western includes embedded Altmetric.com badges. Read more information about Scholarship@Western.
Note: Schulich Medicine & Dentistry Research Office provides access to Altmetric.com’s institutional program, for Schulich researchers only. Please see Schulich's Altmetric page for more information.
Limitations:
- Altmetric.com tracks mentions of publications with DOIs, most of which are articles. Other publications, and those without DOIs, are not usually tracked.
- Altmetric.com was established in 2011 and did not begin tracking mentions until then. Though they have been able to collect some retrospective data, publications and mentions from before 2012 are less complete.
- No one altmetric source is comprehensive. Altmetric.com does not track every journal, and it does not track every source where an article might be mentioned. Furthermore, due to the data harvesting techniques used, sometimes mentions are missed.
