Altmetrics (or Article-Level Metrics) can be used to measure how scholarly articles are being shared, used, and discussed in social media and publisher sites. Altmetrics will not substitute citation counts or the h-index, but complements established article-level metric tools with emerging data sources.
Limitations of traditional metric tools are that it may take years for citations to appear. They also disregard new types of scholarly communication through blog posts, tweets, bookmarking and reference managers.
