More research outputs from DataCite and other DOI registration agencies now tracked

1. What's new?

DOIs are not all registered the same way. Crossref covers most journal articles, but a large amount of scholarly output is registered through other agencies, DataCite being the largest.

Historically, our matching process could only pull metadata from Crossref, Dimensions, and a number of smaller sources. If a mention linked to a DOI from anywhere else, and that DOI's landing page did not itself contain a title, author or date, we had no way to identify the output, so we discarded the mention rather than record an incomplete or inaccurate one.

As of 25 September 2025, Altmetric captures attention data for research outputs with DOIs registered with an agency other than Crossref. This includes DataCite, among others — even when the output's landing page does not carry enough metadata for us to identify it automatically.

2. Value and user impact

Growth in research output coverage: You may notice new mentions and attention scores appearing for research outputs that were not previously tracked.

Data quality improvement: DOIs registered through DataCite already accounted for around 0.7% (roughly 348,000) of all DOI-based outputs tracked historically by Altmetric. That is the DataCite population we could already identify, typically because the landing page itself carried enough metadata for us to work with. This improvement targets a previously invisible group within that broader population: outputs with landing pages carrying nothing but the DOI itself. Our investigation also found that not everything registered through the additional agencies we now track is a research output: some of it is software, images, or physical samples. Altmetric continues to only pick up genuine research outputs.

Please contact the Altmetric Support team for any further questions, we'll be happy to help!