The Altmetric MCP server gives AI assistants direct access to Altmetric's attention tracking data - monitoring where research is being discussed beyond traditional citations, across news media, policy documents, patents, and online platforms. Use it to surface societal engagement with publications or enrich research intelligence pipelines with real-world reach data.
What You Can Do
- Retrieve attention scores and citation counts for publications by DOI, PubMed ID, or other identifiers
- Search attention data across tracked outputs by timeframe and source
- Access full mention text, author details, and metadata for tracked research (commercial tier)
- Search and filter research outputs by author, journal, or department (institutional)
- Analyse aggregated attention metrics by source, date range, and outlet (institutional)
- Explore geographic and demographic audience data for research mentions (institutional)
- Rank and compare journals by attention and engagement metrics (institutional)
Example Prompts
Once configured, try asking your AI assistant:
Look up the Altmetric attention score for DOI 10.1038/nature12373
Which news outlets covered our institution's publications most in the last 90 days?
Show me the geographic breakdown of who's engaging with this paper
Find the top journals by Altmetric attention score in the climate science field
Available Tools
The Altmetric MCP exposes tools across two APIs: the Details Page API provides attention score lookup and citation search (free tier), plus full mention content and metadata (commercial tier); the Explorer API provides institutional-level tools for searching research outputs, analysing aggregated attention metrics, exploring mentions and demographics, and ranking journals by engagement.
View the full tool referenceSetup
This MCP is hosted outside the Developer Portal. Please follow the steps below to get access.
- Get your credentials - Altmetric offers two APIs with different access tiers: Altmetric Explorer API - if your institution has Explorer access, find your API key and secret in Explorer Settings. Details Page API - request API access to obtain a key.
- Install the MCP server - Configuration instructions are available here.
- Restart your client - Restart your AI client to activate the server.
Limitations
The Altmetric MCP is built on the Details Page API and Explorer API, which define the scope of available data and query structures. Available tools vary depending on your access tier - free or commercial. Technical rate limits apply to all requests to ensure platform stability. By using this MCP, users agree to the Altmetric Terms of Use and Reasonable Use Guidelines.
