Altmetric is a free tool that tracks social media attention to research papers and is recognisable because of its use of a colourful donut: 
Altmetric scores for individual articles have been available in STORRE since November 2014.
The University now subscribes to Altmetric for Institutions: this is a service that provides an aggregated view of the Altmetrics scores for individual Stirling Researchers and Organisational Units, as well as for the University as a whole. Article details are fed from the Research Management System (RMS) to the Altmetric platform which collates and displays mentions of those articles from non-traditional sources such as public policy documents, mainstream and social media, post-publication peer-review sites, and online reference managers.
This is a really useful resource and with the current focus on ‘impact’, this tool will allow you to locate mentions of your research in policy documents and on reputable news sites as well as seeing what research is blowing up the Twitterverse.
Via the Altmetric Explorer dashboard, you can browse the data for all of Stirling’s (and others’) research papers, create and save reports, set-up email alerts for new activity, and export data to Excel for further analysis. An account is not required to browse the data, but is required to save reports and set-up email alerts. Quickly create an account using the sign-in option at the top of the page.
You can use the Altmetric platform to:
- See how much online attention your research is getting from the general public and the academic community.
- Understand who is talking about your research, and what they’re saying.
- Compare the broader societal impact of your research with that of other articles within your academic discipline, or across different disciplines.
- Showcase the impact of your articles when applying for faculty positions and funding grants.
Please do take the time to visit the site and have a look around. For further information go to our Altmetric LibGuide. We’d be more than happy to come and demonstrate this tool to your group. If you are interested email the repository librarian.
Betsy Fuller
Research Repository Librarian