Publication Metrics

The term altmetrics refers to new, alternative ways of assessing the impact of authors and publications. It presumes that value can be assessed by counting online shares, saves, reviews, adaptations and mentions. Altmetrics take into account a variety of research products, including gray literature; research blogs; data sets; citation managers, like Mendeley; and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter

Advantages:

• Assesses impact quickly
• Tracks impact outside the academy
• Tracks impact from non-peer-reviewed sources

Disadvantages

• Do Tweets, etc., really measure impact?
• The popularity of social media sites changes over time

• Altmetric.com -- A UK-based company that offers altmetrics services for institutions and researchers. The free Altmetric bookmarklet provides article-level matrics.
• Plum Analytics (Elsevier) -- Tracks journal articles, books, videos, presentations, conference proceedings, datasets, source code, cases and more.
• Paperbuzz --  Designed to provide open data to support development of fully open scholarly metric toolchains. Funded by the Public Knowledge Project. Read more.