XClose

Library Services

Home
Menu

Altmetric at UCL

What is Altmetric?

Altmetric is a commercial service that monitors social media sites, science blogs, news sites and referencing tools for mentions of academic papers. Altmetric can provide details on these mentions for individual papers, as well as an overall score as an approximate indication of the paper's impact. UCL has a subscription to the service as of 2022, allowing us to get full access to this data and to the Altmetric API.

Accessing the service

To log into the service, visit the altmetric website and click the "Explorer Login" link in the top corner, or log in directly. Authentication is through UCL's single-sign-on system and so you should be able to access it seamlessly from offsite. It is available to everyone at UCL who has access to e-resources, both staff and students.

Using the dashboard

Screenshot of Altmetric Explorer

The dashboard allows you to search and filter for specific sets of items using the top bar, and to select either the UCL dataset (with departmental data) or the full Altmetric dataset. Below that, the tabs allow different views of the data - the "highlights" view for overview information, the "research outputs" view to list individual papers, the "mentions" view to list individual tweets, news stories, etc, and so on.

This video (16 minutes) gives a full walkthrough of the Explorer, and further information is available in the Altmetric Help Centre if needed.

Creating reports, sharing results, and exporting data

You can export from most pages in the dashboard using the blue "export this tab" button in the upper right. This will give you a downloadable CSV file (opens in Excel) with relevant information.

For research outputs, it will list the bibliographic details (title, journal, identifiers, etc) plus the aggregate numeric score for each of the altmetric indicators. You can use the identifiers to link this up with other datasets of papers as needed. For UCL papers, it will also list the associated UCL authors and departments.

In other page views, you will be able to export mentions (a line for each mention plus the associated research output); mention sources (individual sources plus aggregate count); journals (aggregated indicator counts by source), and so on.

You can also use the "save search" button to produce a live report or a regular update. Save the search, then use the second item on the left hand sidebar to get a list of saved searches, and from there you can set up a regular update email for new data, or generate a link to a live shareable report. For example, this report shows the highlights (most discussed items) for UCL papers in the earth sciences since 2020. You can also share a direct link to the search results with anyone else who has access by copying the link from the browser; as an example here is the full data for the same report.

UCL data

Data for UCL papers in Altmetric is provided from the RPS system. We are currently planning to update the data every two to four weeks, but later in 2022 will be able to pull in new records on a daily basis. If you spot omissions in your own list of papers, we recommend you check the RPS record to see if it is listed there.

The RPS data has some limitations. Most importantly, it includes some material published before researchers came to UCL - for example, someone who did research and published papers at Glasgow between 2015 and 2020, and then moved to UCL in 2020, may choose to add all their papers from 2015 onwards.