LibGuides: Research Impact Metrics: How Altmetric works

Sources of attention

Altmetric: Our sources

Altmetric tracks a wide range of online sources to capture the conversations and activity related to research outputs. The sources of attention include:

Public policy documents
Mainstream media
Online reference managers
Post-publication peer-review platforms
Wikipedia
Open Syllabus Project
Patents
Blogs
Citations
Research highlights
Social Media
Multimedia and other online platforms

How it tracks

Altmetric: How it works

To be able to track the online attention for a specific piece of research, there are 3 things needed:

An output
An identifier (more information below)
Mentions in a source Altmetric tracks

Generally, Altmetric tracks mentions related to these types of research outputs:

Books
Book chapters
Journal articles
Presentations
Theses/Dissertations
Reports
Conference proceedings
Reviews
Datasets
Working papers
Grey literature
And more!

Types of identifiers

Altmetric: How it works

The unique identifier is important for Altmetric to be able to match the attention to the research. Identifiers Altmetric is designed to automatically recognize extend far beyond journal articles, and include:

PubMedID – typically associated with health sciences research
arXiv ID – Physics, Mathematics & Computer Sciences
ADS ID – Astrophysics data system
SSRN ID – Social Sciences outputs
RePEC ID – economics research
Handle.net identifiers – often used in institutional repositories
URN (Uniform Resource Name) identifiers
ISBNs – books hosted on publisher domains and google books
DOIs – assigned to individual articles at the point of publication, and by platforms such as figshare and Dryad to other outputs (including datasets, images, and more)

Notes

To make sure Altmetric captures the online mentions of IFPRI's research work, a good rule of thumb is to use the DOI link when there is one. The KM team assigns DOIs to our own publications and datasets. Most journal articles have DOI links as well.

However, when a publication does not have a DOI, you may use the repository link that is also tracked by Altmetric. This applies to both record link and direct PDF link. Both links should start with the prefix: https://ebrary.ifpri.org/digital/

Embed the link in the main body of the post will increase the chances for Altmetric to pick up the mention. Altmetric may not pick up links included in headers or in the reference list at the bottom of your post.