Wikipedia tracking enhancement: supporting the Cite Q template

1. What's new?

Wikipedia first launched as an Altmetric attention source in 2015. Since then, references in Wikipedia pages have evolved, as the Wikipedia community has added methods of adding citations. The Cite Q template is one of these methods, which our original Wikipedia tracking implementation could not support.

We have now added the Cite Q template to our coverage, tracking mentions issued from 19 May 2025 onwards.

2. Value and user impact

Wikipedia's Cite Q template returns a formatted citation from statements stored on a Wikidata item (referred to by its Q identifier or QID), describing a citable source such as a scholarly article. References that use Cite Q cite the individual work stated, using metadata about that work, which is held on Wikidata for convenience.

Below is an example of how Wikipedia readers might see a reference that uses Cite Q displayed on a page.

The Wikidata link leads to a Wikidata page listing the research output's metadata (as in this example, related to the screenshot above). If the page includes suitable metadata for Altmetric to identify the mention, we will be able to display it in Altmetric products.

Enhancing our coverage to support the Cite Q template 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.

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