Altmetric data in Webometric Analyst
Altmetric.com is a web site that compiles a range of metrics about academic articles from a range of sources, including Facebook, blogs and Twitter. Altmetric.com is similar in this regard to total-Impact, ReaderMeter, ScienceCard, Crowdometer and PlumX. The Altmetric Tab gives access to some of these Altmetric statistics. Articles cannot be queried for by name but can be queried for by ArXiv ID, DOI, or PubMed ID.
To get Altmetric.com scores for your data:
- Put your data in tab-delimited format, with the first line being headings and each line having a DOI (or other identifier) in the same column. If you just have identifiers, put them in a plain text file, one per line.
- Start Webometric Analyst and select the Altmetric tab.
- Choose the type of document identifier that you have and click the Get Altmetric Info... button. Check the Repeat option if you have a folder with lots of files with the same structure and no other files in the folder.
- Enter the number of the column in your data containing the DOI or other identifier and click OK.
This takes about one second per document.
The results will be in a file with the same name but _altmetric added to the end. The Altmetric.com data is in extra columns at the end of each line of the new file, after the original line. The most useful columns are for Tweeters, Facebook Wall Posts, Blogs, and G+ but there are ten altogether (Blogs, News, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest, Wikipedia, Reviews, Questions, G+) plus readership count and other data. The readership data is only collected for articles that have been mentioned in other sources, so is incomplete.
In summary, the following altmetrics are currently supported. See an Altmetric.com help page for more information about these.
- Altmetric Score
- Mendeley Readers
- Connotea Readers
- CiteUlike Readers
- Total Readers
- Feed Citations (blogs)
- MSM Citations (news)
- Tweeters
- Redditers
- Facebook Wall Links
- Pinners (pinterest.com)
- Wikipedia citations
- Reviews and highlights
- Questions
- Gplus
If there are lines in your file that are missing a DOI or other identifier, these are not copied to the _altmetric output.
To calculate field normalised indicators, see the Altmetric.com section of the Alternative Indicators Summer School Day 2 slides and workshop instructions.