Mention

Basic information

  • URL:  https://mention.com/
  • Cost: Varies: includes both free and fee-based versions with different features.
  • Open source: No

How to use this tool for use/reuse assessment

Mention can be used to monitor the recurrence of alphanumeric strings, such as digital collection or digital object names, for which the practitioner creates alerts. Mention also creates reports that can help the practitioners assess the impact of their own social media campaigns on reuse, as well as to collect demographic information about who is using and reusing the digital collections and objects. This allows practitioners to see when others are mentioning or embedding their digital collections and digital objects.

Ethical guidelines

Practitioners should follow the practices laid out in the “Ethical considerations and guidelines for the assessment of use and reuse of digital content.” The Guidelines are meant both to inform practitioners in their decision-making, and to model for users what they can expect from those who steward digital collections.

Additional guidelines for responsible practice

Mention searches publicly available social media data, as well as other public content from across the web. While this means that Mention complies with the privacy policies of social media companies and the European internet privacy regulation GDPR, users whose use/reuse is being indexed may be unaware of how and to what extent their data may be shared.

Strengths

  Alert Services

  • Unlike other alert services like Google Alerts and Google Scholar, Mention searches social media, forums, and reviews.
  • Mention includes tools to generate reports for reach, influencers, sentiment, and more; other alert services like Google Scholar require users to perform their own aggregation and analysis.
  • Very customizable and has dedicated tech support.

  Altmetrics

  • Unlike PlumX or Altmetric, Mention does not require the use of permanent identifiers to track digital library content.
  • Mention indexes a greater variety of websites oriented towards a non-scholarly audience than PlumX or Altmetric, including Tumblr and Instagram. This makes Mention an excellent source of discovery of non-scholarly reuse of digital library content.
  • Mention offers the ability to set alerts using complex, customizable searches.

Weaknesses

  Alert Services

  • Tracking links to item records for digital library content with a high degree of accuracy requires setting individual search queries for items based on library or collection names or URL strings; this level of manual setup may be difficult for digital libraries with limited resources. High-level search queries, for example a domain name or digital library name, may make assessment more scalable, though less precise.
  • Functionality varies depending on which plan the institution pays for; for example, data export is only available starting at the Company plan. Cost may be prohibitive for digital libraries with lesser financial resources.
  • The number of alerts that can be setup is small compared to other products.
  • Mention is targeted at brands and agencies, so the interface and available reports may be at odds with the assessment priorities of GLAMR institutions.
  • Some user reviews reported that not as many sources were searched as they expected. It is unknown whether these users were from GLAMR institutions or brands and agencies.

  Altmetrics

  • Functionality varies depending on which plan the institution pays for; for example, data export is only available starting at the Company plan.
  • As mentioned in the Alert Services section above, Mention may be unsuitable for measuring a digital library’s altmetrics at scale, with precision.
  • Unlike PlumX or Altmetric, Mention is targeted at brands and agencies, so the interface and available reports may be at odds with the assessment priorities of GLAMR institutions.
  • Mention does not use disambiguation approaches to ensure that URLs or digital library names shared online refer to discrete scholarly objects. For this reason, PlumX and Altmetric are more accurate tools for measuring true use/reuse of a digital collection.
  • Some user reviews reported that not as many sources were searched as they expected. It is unknown whether these users were from GLAMR institutions or brands and agencies.

Used for these methods

Alternative tools

Helping digital collections measure impact

Hashtag: #digreuse

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