Altmetric begin tracking mentions of articles on Sina Weibo

We would like to announce that Altmetric have begun tracking mentions of academic articles on Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo, and the data will shortly be fully integrated into existing Altmetric tools.

The mentions collated will be visible to users via the Altmetric Explorer, a web-based application that allows users to browse the online mentions of any academic article, and, where appropriately licensed, via the article metrics data on publisher platforms.

Launched in 2009, Sina Weibo has become one of the largest social media sites in China, and is most often likened to Twitter. Integrating this data means that Altmetric users will now be able to see a much more global view of the attention an article has received. Altmetric is currently the only article level metrics provider to offer this data.

Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric, commented; 

“One of the requests we see most often from publishers is for us track systems like Sina Weibo. With half a billion users and some 100 million messages per day, this will be a great supplement to the sources authors already see mentions from.”

This new addition joins an established list of news sites, blogs, social media networks and other online sources which Altmetric currently tracks and collates data from. Articles are identified by links to pages containing a unique ID (such as DOI or PubMed ID) and different versions of the same article are disambiguated to provide a summary of the overall attention the work has received.