This is a short vignette explaning how to use rAltmetric. Altmetric is a private company that collects metrics that go far beyond traditional citations. It collects mentions on various social media to provide a more complete picture of the impact of a scholarly publication.

The core functionality of the package is captured in two functions:

altmetrics - Returns data for a valid identifier such as an altmetric object id, a pubmed ID, an arxiv identifier, a doi, ISBN and so on.
altmetric_data - takes the output of the previous function and returns a tidy data.frame

The package can be used to parse a whole batch of identifiers at once.

e.g.

library(rAltmetric)
library(magrittr)
library(purrr)

## 
## Attaching package: 'purrr'

## The following object is masked from 'package:magrittr':
## 
##     set_names

ids <- list(c(
  "10.1038/nature09210",
  "10.1126/science.1187820",
  "10.1016/j.tree.2011.01.009",
  "10.1086/664183"
))

alm <- function(x)  altmetrics(doi = x) %>% altmetric_data()

results <- pmap_df(ids, alm)

## doi

## doi
## doi
## doi

# This results in a data.frame with one row per identifier.

You can now see some citation data for these papers.

library(dplyr)

## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'

## The following objects are masked from 'package:purrr':
## 
##     contains, order_by

## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter, lag

## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
## 
##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

knitr::kable(results %>% select(title, doi,  starts_with("cited")))

title	doi	cited_by_fbwalls_count	cited_by_feeds_count	cited_by_msm_count	cited_by_policies_count	cited_by_posts_count	cited_by_tweeters_count	cited_by_accounts_count	cited_by_rh_count
Coupled dynamics of body mass and population growth in response to environmental change	10.1038/nature09210	1	7	1	1	13	3	13	NA
Stochastic Community Assembly Causes Higher Biodiversity in More Productive Environments	10.1126/science.1187820	NA	1	NA	NA	3	1	3	1
Why intraspecific trait variation matters in community ecology	10.1016/j.tree.2011.01.009	NA	2	NA	NA	11	7	9	NA
Enemies Maintain Hyperdiverse Tropical Forests	10.1086/664183	NA	NA	NA	NA	3	2	3	1