Retrieves Altmerics Data for Any Published Paper from 'Altmetric.com'

Provides a programmatic interface to the citation information and alternate metrics provided by 'Altmetric'. Data from Altmetric allows researchers to immediately track the impact of their published work, without having to wait for citations. This allows for faster engagement with the audience interested in your work. For more information, visit < https://www.altmetric.com/>.

This package provides a way to programmatically retrieve altmetrics from various publication types (books, newsletters, articles, peer-reviewed papers and more) from altmetric.com. The package is really simple to use and only has two major functions:

• altmetrics - Pass it a doi, isbn, uri, arxiv id or other to get metrics
• altmetric_data Pass it the results from the previous call to get a tidy data.frame

Questions, features requests and issues should go here.

Installing the package 🛠

A stable version is available from CRAN. To install

install.packages('rAltmetric')
devtools::install_github("ropensci/rAltmetric")

Quick Tutorial

Obtaining metrics

There was a 2010 paper by Acuna et al that received a lot of attention on Twitter. What was the impact of that paper?

library(rAltmetric)
acuna <- altmetrics(doi = "10.1038/465860a")
acuna
#> Altmetrics on: "Metrics: Do metrics matter?" with altmetric_id: 385053 published in Nature.
#>                         stats
#> cited_by_fbwalls_count      3
#> cited_by_feeds_count        3
#> cited_by_gplus_count        2
#> cited_by_msm_count          1
#> cited_by_policies_count     1
#> cited_by_posts_count       31
#> cited_by_tweeters_count    20
#> cited_by_accounts_count    30

Data

To obtain the metrics in tabular form for further processing, run any object of class altmetric through altmetric_data() to get a data.frame that can easily be written to disk.

altmetric_data(acuna)
#>                         title             doi     pmid
#> 1 Metrics: Do metrics matter? 10.1038/465860a 20559361
#>                                                                         tq1
#> 1 Survey of how metrics are used in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions.
#>                                                                                                   tq2
#> 1 Should some professions be excluded from performance metrics? #metrics #kpi #performancemeasurement
#>                                                tq3
#> 1 “@Nanomedicina: Publications: Do metrics matter?
#>                                               tq4            altmetric_jid
#> 1 Do metrics matter? #oaweek13 (in talk @pgroth ) 4f6fa50a3cf058f610003160
#>      issns1    issns2 journal cohorts.pub cohorts.sci cohorts.com
#> 1 0028-0836 1476-4687  Nature          13           5           2
#>   context.all.count context.all.mean context.all.rank context.all.pct
#> 1           7133716  6.3030007714043           130911              98
#>   context.all.higher_than context.journal.count context.journal.mean
#> 1                 7003174                 44393       68.76030910975
#>   context.journal.rank context.journal.pct context.journal.higher_than
#> 1                10546                  76                       33847
#>   context.similar_age_3m.count context.similar_age_3m.mean
#> 1                        76598              5.330816089403
#>   context.similar_age_3m.rank context.similar_age_3m.pct
#> 1                        1082                         98
#>   context.similar_age_3m.higher_than context.similar_age_journal_3m.count
#> 1                              75516                                  894
#>   context.similar_age_journal_3m.mean context.similar_age_journal_3m.rank
#> 1                     54.580732362822                                 262
#>   context.similar_age_journal_3m.pct
#> 1                                 70
#>   context.similar_age_journal_3m.higher_than type altmetric_id schema
#> 1                                        632 news       385053  1.5.4
#>   is_oa cited_by_fbwalls_count cited_by_feeds_count cited_by_gplus_count
#> 1 FALSE                      3                    3                    2
#>   cited_by_msm_count cited_by_policies_count cited_by_posts_count
#> 1                  1                       1                   31
#>   cited_by_tweeters_count cited_by_accounts_count last_updated  score
#> 1                      20                      30   1454625692 53.388
#>   history.1y history.6m history.3m history.1m history.1w history.6d
#> 1          0          0          0          0          0          0
#>   history.5d history.4d history.3d history.2d history.1d history.at
#> 1          0          0          0          0          0     53.388
#>                                 url   added_on published_on subjects
#> 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/465860a 1317207766   1276646400  science
#>   scopus_subjects readers.citeulike readers.mendeley readers.connotea
#> 1         General                 3              303                2
#>   readers_count
#> 1           308
#>                                                                 images.small
#> 1 https://altmetric-badges.a.ssl.fastly.net/?size=64&score=54&types=mbtttfdg
#>                                                                 images.medium
#> 1 https://altmetric-badges.a.ssl.fastly.net/?size=100&score=54&types=mbtttfdg
#>                                                                  images.large
#> 1 https://altmetric-badges.a.ssl.fastly.net/?size=180&score=54&types=mbtttfdg
#>                                               details_url
#> 1 http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?citation_id=385053

You can save these data into a clean spreadsheet format:

acuna_data <- altmetric_data(acuna)
readr::write_csv(acuna_data, path = 'acuna_altmetrics.csv')

Gathering metrics for many DOIs

For a real world use-case, one might want to get metrics on multiple publications. If so, just read them from a spreadsheet and llply through them like the example below.

library(rAltmetric)
library(magrittr)
library(purrr)
 
 
ids <- list(c(
  "10.1038/nature09210",
  "10.1126/science.1187820",
  "10.1016/j.tree.2011.01.009",
  "10.1086/664183"
))
 
alm <- function(x)  altmetrics(doi = x) %>% altmetric_data()
 
results <- pmap_df(ids, alm)
# This results in a data.frame with one row per identifier.

Further reading

• Metrics: Do metrics matter?
• The altmetrics manifesto

📚 To cite package rAltmetric in publications use:

  Karthik Ram (2017). rAltmetric: Retrieves altmerics data for any
  published paper from altmetrics.com. R package version 0.7.
  http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rAltmetric
 
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
 
  @Manual{,
    title = {rAltmetric: Retrieves altmerics data for any published paper from
altmetrics.com},
    author = {Karthik Ram},
    year = {2017},
    note = {R package version 0.7},
    url = {http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rAltmetric},
  }