Altmetrics stands for "alternative metrics and lets us measure and monitor the reach and impact of scholarship and research through online interactions. These numbers provide a more complete picture of the reach and impact of research and scholarship; one that goes beyond citations in peer-reviewed publications. Altmetrics works with your online presence to constantly accumulate data at a much faster speed compared to traditional metrics.
Benefits
Altmetrics can answer questions such as:
Considerations
This is the Altmetric page for the sample article referred to. Altmetric has calculated an overall score for this research based upon the amount of interaction across various platforms including news outlets, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. Each platform is assigned a weighted score which when combined provides the overall attention score. This article has been mentioned on Twitter over 8,000 times and has appeared in over 33 news articles.
It is possible to look at each platform individually in order to see who has tweeted or which news outlets have picked up the research.
Almetric data is available in several ways. Here is more information on where you can find and access this data