The University of Reading has a subscription to Altmetric Explorer. This is useful tool that can help researchers track how their research outputs are discussed and shared online.
The advantage of Altmetric data is that mentions can be tracked from the moment an output is published rather than waiting possibly several years for citations to accrue.
Altmetric Explorer tracks mentions of research outputs in news outlets, Wikipedia, blogs, social media (X, Bluesky, Facebook etc), policy documents, patents, clinical guidelines and peer reviews. The mentions are collated and each output is given a score based on the type and amount of attention received. Each category of attention is represented by a different colour in the Altmetric donut.
Researchers can also track the timeline of attention which can be useful to measure the effectiveness of promotional activities.
Sentiment analysis has recently been introduced in Altmetric Explorer. This new AI-powered analysis gives an indication of whether the mentions in X and Bluesky are positive or negative.
As soon as your full text document is open in the CentAUR repository, you can get information on downloads. The simplest way to view this is to look at the record in CentAUR. The graph will show recent downloads per month.
It is also possible to see download statistics for a particular author over a certain time period and the most downloaded items. A map of the world will also give an idea of where the users who downloaded the content were based.
If you require more detailed information about the downloads of your item in CentAUR, contact the CentAUR team
Some journal websites will show information on downloads and clicks either publicly or through author dashboards. This information can give you an idea of the usage of your output as soon as it is published. Check with the publisher of your output to find out what data are available.
Examples:
1. Article views of an Open Access article in the journal Birds
Example 2:
This graph is from an article published in PLOS and give information on views since publication and also the number of article views that led to a PDF download of the article. In this case, 67% of views resulted in a PDF download indicating that the visitor might be more likely to read and cite the article later. The PLOS site also provides information on citations in Dimensions, saves in reference managers such as Mendeley and citeulike, and mentions of the article on X, Wikipedia, reddit and Facebook.
