Altmetric Explorer

Altmetric Explorer is the commercial dashboard product sold by Altmetric (part of Digital Science) to universities, research offices, libraries, and publishers so they can search, filter, benchmark, and report on research attention data at scale — rather than looking up one output’s Altmetric Attention Score at a time. It is easy to conflate the two: the Attention Score is the underlying metric Altmetric calculates for an individual research output, while Altmetric Explorer is the separately licensed reporting and analysis layer built on top of the full dataset behind that score.

What Altmetric Explorer actually does

Per Altmetric’s own product description, Explorer for Institutions gives subscribing organizations a searchable interface over the full set of research outputs Altmetric tracks attention for, with functionality including:

• Author, group, and department-level views — filtering attention data down to a specific researcher, lab, department, or the institution as a whole.
• Benchmarking — comparing an institution’s aggregate attention against peer organizations.
• Real-time monitoring — new mentions and shares populate as Altmetric’s tracking picks them up, so attention to a given output can be watched as it accumulates rather than only reviewed retrospectively.
• Attention-source breakdowns and reporting exports — summarizing where mentions came from (news, policy documents, blogs, social platforms, Wikipedia, and more) for use in evaluation, review, and outreach reporting.
• Drill-down to source-level detail — for any tracked output, Explorer links through to the underlying Altmetric details page showing the specific mentions and shares that make up its Attention Score.

Altmetric markets Explorer as covering tens of millions of tracked research outputs (Altmetric’s own marketing materials cite a figure in the tens of millions and counting); treat the exact current number as a vendor-reported figure that changes over time rather than a fixed fact, and check altmetric.com directly if a precise count is load-bearing for a specific use.

Who subscribes to it

Explorer for Institutions is typically licensed by research offices, university libraries, and communications/press teams that need to report on the reach of institutional research output — for example, supporting funder impact reporting, informing research-assessment exercises, or evidencing public engagement and policy uptake for individual researchers, departments, or the institution as a whole. Altmetric separately sells an Explorer for Publishers edition aimed at journals and publishers wanting the same search/benchmark/report functionality over their own published content.

Altmetric Explorer vs. the Altmetric Attention Score

These are not competing products — Explorer is built on the Attention Score, not an alternative to it. The distinction that matters operationally: the Attention Score (and the free bookmarklet/badge that display it) is available to anyone, for any single output, at no cost. Altmetric Explorer is the paid, login-gated tool for working with that same underlying attention data across many outputs, many authors, or an entire institution at once, with search, benchmarking, and reporting functionality the free score display does not provide. See Altmetric Attention Score for how the underlying score itself is calculated.

Altmetric Explorer vs. PlumX Metrics

Altmetric Explorer’s closest commercial competitor is PlumX Metrics, Elsevier’s altmetrics product (built on the Plum Analytics platform Elsevier acquired in February 2017). The products differ in both scoring philosophy and packaging:

• Composite score vs. category counts. Altmetric (and Explorer’s reporting) is built around the single, weighted Attention Score. PlumX Metrics deliberately reports five separate, non-aggregated category counts — Citations, Usage, Captures, Mentions, and Social Media — with no combined score.
• Standalone dashboard vs. embedded display. Altmetric Explorer is a dedicated, subscription dashboard application in its own right. PlumX Metrics is most visible as the ‘Plum Print’ visualization embedded directly on ScienceDirect and Scopus record pages, though Elsevier also offers dashboard/reporting functionality for institutional PlumX subscribers.
• Ownership. Altmetric is part of Digital Science (also behind Dimensions); PlumX Metrics is owned and operated by Elsevier.

Many research offices track attention data from both providers, since coverage and weighting differ enough that the two are not simply interchangeable views of the same underlying activity.

Related standards and context

Both Altmetric’s and PlumX’s underlying data categories trace back to the vocabulary and data-quality work of NISO’s Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Initiative — see NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Initiative. For the broader concept both products are instances of, see Altmetrics and Article-level metrics.