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Trying to feed my Altmetric badges

A few months ago, I added Altmetric badges to my literature list. Because I like colours, and it's a good way to see which paper needs a tweet, blogpost or else.

Altmetric browses the web to find mentions of papers, on blogposts, twitter, etc. They possibly make some money out of it but adding an Altmetric-badge on your homepage is (so far) a free service.

This is how it looks like (zoomed out).

For the colour-coding, see here: The donut and Altmetric Attention Score.

I find it quite nice. If there is no badge, it means no-one has mentioned the paper.

Now, one can write a blogpost, but whereas our Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks (>10,000 visits/month) is among the 9000+ blogs surveyed by Altmetric, Res.I.P. is not (passed 1000/month; thanks also to the first Ukrainian and Russian bots).

Arrived in the blogosphere: the Ukrainian bots found Res.I.P. — note the sudden access peak.


Why I have a Twitter account to fill this important gap.

Noticing that both of our 2016 (and still valid) Coexistence Approach critiques were un-tweeted, , I made a thread with two tweets.


Side-note: The so-called "Coexistence Approach" has been a holy, i.e. not to be criticised, "standard" in European Miocene and older palaeoclimate reconstructions enforced and used by a single science consortium ; papers have become much less in the last years, especially since the main dissemination platform, Palaeo^3 has a new policy that CA applicants need to publish the used data leading to the retraction of at least two papers in the last year(s). A read-list: Business as usual, Trying to disperse the Impermeable Fog #2, and #3, Miraculous reconstruction of palaeoaltitude and -temperature.



The initial tweet (advertising Grimm et al. 2016) brought me the wanted badge right away, but the paper in the subsequent tweet (advertising Grimm & Potts 2016) remained uncherished.


Re-tweeting myself (and being re-tweeted by a friend with 100x more followers than me) didn't help either.

What about a fresh tweet using the paper's genuine URL (pre-made tweet sent off via the blue-birdie-button on the journal's page)?

No, no badge appears. No tweet, no re-tweet recorded.

Maybe it just works with the DOI, the digital object identifier (my Altmetric-badges are linked using the DOIs of the respective papers)? Sending off another tweet

Alas, even after an hour of waiting, nothing.

Now, paper 1 (Grimm et al. 2016), which directly received its badge recognition, is a paywalled paper published with one of the big (and big-money) science publishers (although we should have known better, but being an add-on to our 2012 paper, we'd like to have it in the same journal), paper 2 (Grimm & Potts 2016) was published in a journal issued by Copernicus on behalf of the EGU, open access (OA) with transparent peer review (and a 2-month open discussion phase; the journal's access statistics for the paper are not too bad). Could that be the reason?

I tried also another, yet un-tweeted, paper of mine published in a Polish palaebotanical (low-impact, naturally) OA journal (no APC charges; I think, thanks to the European Union) using Sciendo, a De Gruyter service (a small-ish, long-established science publisher) and the paper's URL (not the DOI).

Tweet (and re-tweet) were counted by Altmetric.

Checked again the specifications (html code) for the badge: code (same as for all other papers) and DOI are the right ones, but the tweets (and re-tweets) are not counted. I then tried the DOIs of some of the "highlights" papers published in Climates of the Past – either there are no or very few tweets, even when a paper has two dozens of authors (1 out of 3 researchers is on Twitter according PeerJ, which advocates tweeting your published pre-print or final paper), or, for some reason, tweeting a Climates of the Past paper doesn't count (fully).

Odd, these metrics, aren't they?

Altmetric seems aware of those slipping through.
If you're waiting for a news story or blog post to appear, then please give it at least a day. We try to pick up mentions as quickly as possible, but sometimes it could take a little longer to process everything, especially during peak times. Occasionally we may miss mentions for other reasons.

If more than a day has passed and the mention still hasn’t appeared, then please fill out this form. Your request will go to our support team, who will take a look and update your Altmetric details page as soon as possible. You can also reach out to us on Twitter at @altmetric.

Now, I waited a week, give them a little bit of time, but, alas, still no badge for our Climates of the Past paper. They are indeed oddly fickle things, these metrics.
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