A large-scale comparison of coverage and mentions captured by the two altmetric aggregators: Altmetric.com and PlumX

Abstract

The increased social media attention to scholarly articles has resulted in efforts to create platforms & services to track and measure the social media transactions around scholarly articles in different social platforms (such as Twitter, Blog, Facebook) and academic social networks (such as Mendeley, Academia and ResearchGate). Altmetric.com and PlumX are two popular aggregators that track social media activity around scholarly articles from a variety of social platforms and provide the coverage and transaction data to researchers for various purposes. However, some previous studies have shown that the social media data captured by the two aggregators have differences in terms of coverage and magnitude of mentions. This paper aims to revisit the question by doing a large-scale analysis of social media mentions of a data sample of 1,785,149 publication records (drawn from multiple disciplines, demographies, publishers). Results obtained show that PlumX tracks more wide sources and more articles as compared to Altmetric.com. However, the coverage and average mentions of the two aggregators vary across different social media platforms, with Altmetric.com recording higher mentions in Twitter and Blog, and PlumX recording higher mentions in Facebook and Mendeley, for the same set of articles. The coverage and average mentions captured by the two aggregators across different document types, disciplines and publishers is also analyzed.

Can we see gender through the microscope? The research output using menstrual blood cells has much to say

“…Within our sample, 40.9% of the papers received no social attention (AAS), which is a smaller number than observed for other publications (45), indicating social interest in mbMSC. Yet, the average AAS was 3.0 per paper, which is lower than the score found in other analyses (idem).…”

Identifying science in the news: An assessment of the precision and recall of Altmetric.com news mention data

“…However, a mention typically includes research information such as author names, journal titles, and study timeframes, or hyperlinks to research items (e.g., journal articles, datasets, images, white papers, reports). Altmetric data providers also vary in the methods they use to collect and process these mentions, meaning that different providers can yield different event data for the same research outputs (Karmakar et al, 2021 ). While there is evidence that differences between providers are decreasing over time (Bar-Ilan et al, 2019 ), concerns about data quality remain (Barata, 2019 ; Torres-Salinas et al, 2018a ; Williams, 2017 ).…”

“…Among Altmetric data providers, Altmetric.com (or “Altmetric”) is the most popular, used in more than half of Altmetrics studies analyzed in a recent meta-analysis (Ortega, 2020b ). Altmetric may be the preferred service because it gathers more mentions of research on Twitter, in blogs, and in news articles, relative to other popular providers (Karmakar et al, 2021 ; Ortega, 2020b ; Zahedi et al, 2014 ). However, Altmetric’s data are also imperfect.…”

Evaluating the online impact of reporting guidelines for randomised trial reports and protocols: a cross-sectional web-based data analysis of CONSORT and SPIRIT initiatives

“…Plum Analytics is a subscription-based platform founded in 2012 which provides a wide range of Altmetrics (categorized into citations, usage, captures, mentions, and social media metrics) for each publication (Williams, 2019 ). The literature has pointed out PlumX as one of the major altmetrics data providers, especially to capture Mendeley readership (Ortega, 2018 ; Zahedi & Costas, 2018 ; Ortega, 2020 ; Karmakar et al, 2021 ).…”