Abstract

The quality and impact of scholarly articles are traditionally evaluated using metrics that put citation counts at the center. In the era of digitization, advanced online platforms and social media have transformed the dissemination of scientific information results and introduced new metrics for evaluating the influence of scholarly outputs and planning research studies. Alternative metrics have emerged as tools for immediate measuring of scholarly outputs upon their online publication and dissemination through numerous online platforms, including social media channels. The Altmetrtic Attention Score by Altmetric.com has gained its global importance as an integral indicator for evaluation of constantly changing societal influence of individual articles. To a large extent, this and other social media metrics complement established citation metrics, allowing to visualize and predict implications at early stages of post-publication promotion. This article overviews characterstics of various altmetric tools and their growing roles for planning and evaluating scientific research.