The coverage of blogs and news in the three major altmetric data providers

The objective of this study is to compare the coverage of the three main altmetric data providers (PlumX, Altmetric.com and Crossref Event Data) according to blog posts and news. The paper emphasizes the coverage the events that mention publications with the purpose of observing the media coverage and overlap between services. More than 100,000 random publications from Crossref were searched in the three providers. The link, title and source of the events that mention each document were retrieved. Results show that the number of publications mentioned in blogs (9.9%) and news (4.8%) is very low, being Altmetric.com the service with more documents mentioned by blogs (6%) and news (3.7%). Altmetric.com also covers more blogs (37.8%), while PlumX collects a large number of news media (36.5%). The overlap between the altmetric providers is rather low in publications (7.4%), events (0.5%) and sources (4.1%). The study concludes that the employment of several providers is necessary to undertake any reliable altmetric study.

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