In order to do this, Altmetric tracks a range of online sites and sources looking for 'mentions' (links or written references) to scholarly outputs (which include journal articles, blogs, data sets and more).

[17] Sources of the attention include the mainstream media, public policy documents, social and academic networks, post-publication peer-review forums and, more recently, Wikipedia and the Open Syllabus Project.

[18] The data are tracked in real-time and collated in the Altmetric details pages, which provide a clickable summary of all of the online attention relating to a single research output.

Based on the volume and source of attention an item has received, the score is intended to reflect the reach or popularity of the research output.

A multicolored 'donut' visualization is also generated to provide a summary of the sources of the attention that an item has received (red for news, light blue for Twitter, etc.).