Question: Can you suggest a platform that aggregates online activity from social media, news articles, and policy documents to measure research influence?

If you want a service that indexes online activity from social media, news articles and policy papers to gauge research impact, Altmetric is a good option. This information retrieval service indexes online attention signals for published research, providing a measure of research impact and influence. It indexes data from sources like social media, news articles and policy papers, and offers tools to track activity and optimize outreach. The service is designed to be easy to use with visualizations, filtering and reports that can be shared, and is suitable for academic institutions, scholarly publishers, corporate R&D, government and funders.

Another good option is Semantic Scholar, a free AI-powered research service that includes a database of more than 219 million scientific papers across all disciplines. It has powerful search filters, brief summaries and tools to format papers with citations in different styles. Semantic Scholar also offers AI-powered research feeds, automated email alerts when papers are cited and a dedicated dashboard to track research activity. It's good for researchers and developers who want to keep up to date with the latest research without having to pay for a subscription.

For a more narrowly focused service that pulls in social media and news articles, Digimind is a social listening service that indexes content from more than 25 social media sites and 800 million other online sources. It can automatically curate content, analyze sentiment and provide visual listening tools to help spot opportunities and threats. The service is geared for marketers, researchers and analysts who need to find information to inform business strategy and operations.

If you're looking for a service that focuses on citations and references, Scite is a good option. It can provide Smart Citations that offer context and categorization of evidence supporting or contradicting scientific papers. The service indexes search over metadata and citation statements, offers customizable dashboards and reference checking to ensure proper citations. Scite is geared for researchers, universities, companies and publishers in areas like pharma, enterprise and government, so it's a good tool for verifying research data.