Altmetrics (i.e., stands for alternative metrics) has been defined as "the study and use of scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments" (Priem et al., 2012). Altmetrics utilizes online activity to record and measure the impact of journals, articles, and authors. Altmetrics complement traditional measures of impact (e.g., h-index). Some advantages of Altmetrics include they are quickly and regularly updated, capture data from a number of sources both within and outside the scholarly community, and are generally obtained from open source web services, thereby allow for verification. This data is used to calculate an Altmetric score, which is a measure of the quality and quantity of attention that a document like an article has received.

Examples of Altmetrics:

Number of times a document has been viewed, downloaded, clicked, video plays, library holdings
Number of times a document has been exported to a citation manager like Zotero, Mendeley
Number of times a document has been emailed or shared on social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
Number and type of mentions in the mainstream media like blog posts comments, reviews, Wikipedia

Cited Sources:

Pollak Library, California State University, Fullerton. (2021). Research Metrics, Altmetrics. https://libraryguides.fullerton.edu/researchmetrics
Berkeley Library, University of California. (2020). Measuring Research Impact: Altmetrics. https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/researchimpact/altmetrics
(2021). A Beginner’s Guide to Altmetrics. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6XawJ7-880