New data, new possibilities: Exploring the insides of Altmetric.com

TL;DR

This study examines Altmetric.com’s data collection, coverage, and sources, revealing its strengths and limitations in providing comprehensive altmetric data for scientific publications.

Contribution

We provide an in-depth analysis of Altmetric.com’s data sources, coverage, and transparency, highlighting its potential and areas for improvement.

Findings

Altmetric.com retrieved 19% of analyzed papers with altmetric data.

Five social media sources account for 95.5% of data coverage.

Twitter and Mendeley are the most significant sources.

Abstract

This paper analyzes Altmetric.com, one of the most important altmetric data providers currently used. We have analyzed a set of publications with DOI number indexed in the Web of Science during the period 2011-2013 and collected their data with the Altmetric API. 19% of the original set of papers was retrieved from Altmetric.com including some altmetric data. We identified 16 different social media sources from which Altmetric.com retrieves data. However five of them cover 95.5% of the total set. Twitter (87.1%) and Mendeley (64.8%) have the highest coverage. We conclude that Altmetric.com is a transparent, rich and accurate tool for altmetric data. Nevertheless, there are still potential limitations on its exhaustiveness as well as on the selection of social media sources that need further research.