Wikipedia tracking enhancement: increasing our coverage of Handle System identifiers

1. What's new?

Wikipedia first launched as an Altmetric attention source in 2015. Since then, our system has been equipped to pick up Handle System identifiers in the url=https://hdl.handle.net/10182/* format.

References in Wikipedia pages have evolved to also include Handle System identifiers in the hdl=10182/* format. We have now added this format to our coverage, tracking mentions issued from 13 May 2025 onwards.

2. Value and user impact

The Handle System is used by organisations including national laboratories, universities, government agencies, research groups, and major publishers; therefore, the types of research outputs we track attention for in Altmetric - journal articles, books, and more - often have Handle System identifiers.

Enhancing our coverage of Handle System identifiers increases the number of Wikipedia mentions users can now track in Altmetric, giving users the ability to more effectively measure the attention the research they are interested in is receiving in Wikipedia. We identified this improvement opportunity thanks to feedback from researchers using our products, who highlighted that, currently, Wikipedia frequently prefers to cite Handle System identifiers using the hdl=10182/* format (as in the example below from this Wkipedia page).

Adding this format to our tracking contributed to increasing the number of Handle System identifier mentions we track in Wikipedia to a total of over 17,000.

For any further questions, please contact the Altmetric Support team - we'll be happy to help.