Understanding the impact of research on policy using Altmetric data

Usage, sharing, and discussion data sourced from the scholarly and social web (altmetrics) are being increasingly recognized as tools for understanding the diverse impacts that research can have on the world.

We have developed a text-mining solution, the Altmetric Policy Miner (APM), to discover mentions of research outputs in policy documents from diverse groups such as the International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By automatically identifying references to scholarly content in policy documents, we aim to help researchers and institutions to better understand the “real world” usage and application of their work.

Here, we explain our current process for sourcing, scraping, validating, and surfacing policy mentions of research outputs. We also include case studies that illustrate how policy data mined by Altmetric are presently being used.

This poster was presented at the 2015 CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI9), from 17-19 June 2015 in Geneva, Switzerland.