Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, use the Social Web to generate new measures of scholarly impact.  Examples of altmetrics include the number of:

• Mentions on Facebook, Twitter or professional networking sites, e.g. ResearchGate
• Comments in publisher-hosted spaces, e.g. PLOS or blogs
• Download reports from UR Scholarship Repository
• Mentions in the mainstream media
• Social bookmarks on sites such as CiteULike
• Exports to citation management programs e.g. Mendeley, Zotero

Advantages of altmetrics:

• Fast: Altmetrics are generated and gathered immediately.  Traditional citations take time to accumulate.
• Diverse: Altmetrics capture data from a variety of sources, including the scholarly community, the media and the general public.  Traditional impact measures only reflect the impact of a work within the academic setting.  Moreover, some alternative measures looks beyond counts to content.
• Open: Data is typically gathered from a variety of open source web services, which means that conclusions based on altmetrics can be verified by others.

Altmetrics are a burgeoning area of study and they are not meant to replace traditional measures of impact, but they do provide another way to assess research impact.

Noteworthy altmetrics tools and services:

• Altmetric.com
• ImpactStory
• Plum Analytics
• PeerEvaluation
• Mendeley
• Kudos

Having your work formally cited by other researchers is a very slow process. Altmetrics are faster and wider-ranging measures of how people—both other researchers and the general public—are interested in your work.