The Altmetric donut visualization and Altmetric Attention Score have been developed to help give an at-a-glance summary of the online attention an article has received.
A higher score indicates a larger amount of attention, and the different colors of the donut represent the different sources in which the article has been mentioned.
Data from most sources is updated on an hourly, or at least daily, basis. Altmetric text mine news sources for mentions of the journal title and author names, and cross-reference this with an external database to determine which article the news story is about. For all other sources, for Altmetric to be able to pick up the mention automatically there needs to be an HTML link to the article page (the one with a DOI or other unique identifier on) in the main body of the text.