Altmetrics (alternative metrics) are new measurements that are being used to track the attention that scholarly articles and datasets receive via social media. It is hoped that they will be seen as an alternative to the traditional Journal Impact Factor, to measure scholarly impact in the digital environment. They focus on measuring scholarly interactions via tweets, blogs, social bookmarking, etc.
Altmetrics are new ways of engaging with research output that are published via social media. They do not measure the quality of a journal, but measure how articles and other scholarly outputs have been used. They complement traditional citation metrics.
Altmetrics measure:
Examples of metrics used: Views, downloads, bookmarks, citations in Wikipedia, mentions in social media, etc.