Table 1.
Examples of Data Collection Sources for Altmetric Scores*
| Source name | Collection method | Update frequency | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Third party data provider API | Real-time feed | An online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, called “tweets.” | |
| Facebook API | Daily | An American for-profit corporation and an online social media and social networking service. | |
| Policy Documents | PDFs collected and scanned from policy sources and repositories | Daily | Scanning and text-mining international policy document PDFs for references, which are looked up in CrossRef/PubMed and resolved to DOIs. |
| News | RSS feeds and API | Real-time feed | Manually curated news sources, with data provided via a third-party provider and RSS feeds direct. |
| Blogs | RSS feeds | Daily | A discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries. |
| Mendeley | Mendeley API | Daily | A desktop and web program produced by Elsevier for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online. |
| Scopus | Scopus API | Real-time feed | Elsevier’s abstract and citation database. |
| Post-publication peer reviews | PubPeer and Publons APIs | Daily | Peer review comments collected from item records and associated by unique identifier. |
| Reddit API | Daily | An American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts, and images, which are then voted up or down by other members. | |
| Wikipedia | Wikipedia API | Real-time feed | Mentions of scholarly outputs collected from References section. English Wikipedia only. |
| Stack Overflow Q&A | Stack Overflow API | Daily | A privately held website created in 2008 to be a more open alternative to earlier Q&A sites. A platform for users to ask and answer questions. |
| F1000 Reviews | F1000 API | Daily | Faculty of 1000 Research is an open research publishing platform that offers immediate publication of articles and other research outputs without “editorial bias.” Includes transparent peer review and inclusion of all source data. |
| Google+ | Google+ API | Daily | An internet based social network. Public posts only. |
| YouTube | YouTube API | Daily | An American video-sharing website. Scans for links to scholarly outputs in video comments. |
| Open Syllabus | Static Import from Open Syllabus | Quarterly | Academic data mining project based at Columbia University that analyzes over 1 million college course syllabi. |
| Web of Science | Clarivate Analytics API | Real-time feed | Citation counts from peer-reviewed literature. |
*
Data from Sina Weibo, CiteULike, Pinterest and LinkedIn is no longer collected. Coverage ended 7/24/15 (Sina Weibo), 12/14 (CiteULike), 6/20/13 (Pinterest) and 3/12/14 (LinkedIn). All data previously collected remains in the database and continues to appear on the Altmetric details pages.
API = application programming interface
RSS = rich site summary
PDF = portable document format
DOI = digital object identifier