Altmetric
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| Altmetric | |
|---|---|
| Name | Altmetric |
| Type | Private |
| Industry | Research analytics |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Founder | Euan Adie |
| Headquarters | London |
| Products | Altmetric Attention Score, Altmetric Explorer, badges |
| Parent | Digital Science |
Altmetric Altmetric is a research attention-tracking service that aggregates online mentions of scholarly outputs. It tracks attention from news outlets, social media, policy documents, and other online sources to produce quantitative and qualitative indicators of visibility. The service is used by researchers, libraries, publishers, and funders to complement traditional citation-based measures.
Overview
Altmetric collects mentions of scholarly works across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and mainstream outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. It also indexes references from institutional repositories like PubMed Central, policy sources such as World Health Organization guidance and European Commission documents, and databases including CrossRef, PubMed, and Scopus. The core output is a composite attention indicator that is displayed alongside metadata from providers such as Digital Object Identifier registries and publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley-Blackwell, and PLOS.
History and Development
Altmetric was founded in 2011 by Euan Adie following work at projects connected to Nature and Nature Publishing Group and engagement with digital tools from Mendeley and Figshare. Early development intersected with initiatives by organizations such as Wellcome Trust, Jisc, and Association of Research Libraries to explore alternative indicators. In 2013 the company joined the portfolio of the technology investment firm Digital Science, aligning with services like Symplectic and Overleaf. Subsequent phases involved partnerships with publishers including Taylor & Francis, integrations with institutional systems at universities such as Harvard University, University of Oxford, and University of Cambridge, and feature expansion informed by conversations with funders like the National Institutes of Health and the European Research Council.
Methodology and Metrics
Altmetric quantifies attention using a weighted scoring system that combines source types, outlet reach, and volume of mentions; components draw on data from social platforms such as Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn, news services including Agence France-Presse and Reuters, and reference managers like Zotero. The methodology references identifiers from CrossRef and ORCID records to disambiguate authors associated with institutions such as Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The composite score—often visualized as a multicolored "donut"—breaks down contributions by category: news, blogs, policy, patents, and online reference managers. Validation studies have compared the indicator against citation metrics from Web of Science and Google Scholar and contextualized findings alongside altmetrics research published in journals such as PLOS ONE and Journal of Informetrics.
Products and Services
Altmetric offers tools for stakeholders including a public record viewable on publisher article pages, an institutional analytics platform used by libraries like British Library and Library of Congress, and an Explorer product for research offices and funders such as Wellcome Trust and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Publisher integrations provide badges embedded by organizations like Nature Publishing Group, BMJ, and Cell Press. Services extend to custom reports for academic departments at institutions including Yale University, University of Toronto, and ETH Zurich, and APIs employed by aggregators and platforms like Dimensions and ORCID. Training and consultancy have been provided in collaboration with consortia such as COAR and infrastructure projects including DataCite.
Reception and Criticism
Reception among stakeholders has ranged from enthusiastic adoption by publishers such as Frontiers to critical scrutiny in research communities active in venues like Altmetrics conference and journals including Research Evaluation. Criticisms have focused on potential gaming similar to concerns raised about metrics in the context of Journal Impact Factor debates and the DORA movement. Scholars from institutions such as University College London and University of Leiden have highlighted limitations including disciplinary biases toward fields with active social-media presence and the challenge of interpreting attention from outlets like BuzzFeed versus policy citations in sources such as United Nations reports. Discussions in policy fora involving European Commission and funders have urged caution in using attention measures for hiring and promotion decisions.
Impact and Applications
Altmetric data have informed research-impact narratives used in grant applications to agencies such as the National Science Foundation and to support public engagement assessments at museums like the Smithsonian Institution. Libraries and research offices employ the service to track outreach efforts tied to events like Open Access Week and to benchmark institution-wide visibility against peers including University of California, Berkeley and Imperial College London. Publishers use attention indicators to curate press strategies and highlight high-profile outputs from authors affiliated with research centers like Salk Institute and Max Planck Society. Studies leveraging Altmetric-derived datasets have appeared in outlets such as Nature Communications and Science Advances, exploring diffusion of findings from trials registered with ClinicalTrials.gov and preprints hosted on bioRxiv and arXiv.