Altmetric to offer monograph data

Digital Science company Altmetric, which tracks and analyses online activity around journals articles, is to branch out to cover title and chapter insights for scholarly books as well.

The Altmetric doughnut "badges" - designed to be embedded on publisher websites and other content-hosting platforms - will display a real-time record of mentions for specific titles on news outlets, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube and government policy documents, for authors, editors and readers to monitor. Meanwhile a collated record of all the online mentions will be stored on the Altmetric details page.

Book level data will be gathered on all monographs via their ISBN, for benchmarking purposes. For Altmetric customers, chapter-level data will also be made available. 

A pilot project for what Altmetric is calling 'Badges for Books' was run with Holtzbrinck stablemate Springer Nature, and the service is launching with first customer Taylor & Francis and its Routledge Handbooks Online platform in May.

Altmetric c.e.o. Euan Adie said the service had been developed as a response to author demand, and has been nuanced to reflect the different priorities of monograph publishing, which is much more slanted towards humanities and social sciences (HSS) than STM-dominated journals publishing.

"Reviews are less important in STM but being reviewed in a magazine like Choice is a big deal for HSS," he told The Bookseller. "Meanwhile classicists don't care about Twitter but care about specialist review journals. So we've made that more prominent [in Altmetrics for books]."

He added: "The market is smaller [for monograph metrics, compared with journals], but it has a correspondingly higher value. There is a smaller number of books than journal articles but a higher need [for data]."  

David Cox, director of digital products at Taylor & Francis, said: "Users are telling us that traditional scholarly measures of impact are not enough any more and 'Badges for Books' will mean that we are able to address that need by exposing more of the attention and engagement that content of all types gets."