Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analysing and informing scholarship. As scholars increasingly move more of their academic activity to the web, Altmetrics offer complementary ways to measure research impact beyond the traditional methods such as peer review and citation counts.
Altmetrics is summarized in: J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Altmetrics: A manifesto, 26 October 2010.
While most of the various Altmetrics products require an institutional subscription, there are various free Altmetric tools. For example, Altmetric Bookmarklet is a free browser tool which will let you look at an individual article's Altmetric attention score. Additionally, researchers can add an Altmetric Researcher Badge to their website or online CV to help showcase their research impact.
Three example profile services, which make use of altmetrics are Impact Story, Altmetric, and Plum Analytics. Each service records and aggregates some or all of the following types of activity:
Groth P, Taylor M. (2013) Helping scholars tell their stories using altmetrics.
