Alternative metrics (or "altmetrics") are designed to fill gaps left by traditional indicators - they may focus more on the outreach of a publication beyond academia, or say something about publication types which do not have good citation data available. For example, they can include downloads, reads, mentions in the news, sales, citations in policy, or mentions of the work on social media. They can be useful for seeing where your work has been used outside academia, and keeping track of where it spreads.

How to: Some prominent services for gathering these statistics include Altmetric (altmetric.com), Overton, and Lens.org, but some altmetrics are found from publisher websites and repositories. See Module 3 for guidance in how to find various alternative metrics using Altmetric, lens.org and other sources.

Issues

Lemke et al. 2020 provide a discussion and references for issues. For example:

Alternative metrics are still relatively new and being developed. Some reviewers may not be familiar with them, or consider them unimportant.
For some, we are not yet sure how reliable they are, or exactly what they indicate. For example, a blog post about an article likely signifies high engagement, whereas an "access" may only mean that someone has skim-read the abstract. This makes something like the Altmetric "total score", which aggregates different uses, difficult to interpret.
They can be affected by other factors than the quality of the publication; for example, the social media culture of the field, or external events. Even title length is associated with media attention in some fields!
Inequalities exist in how researchers experience social media. Some experience a higher degree of inappropriate or threatening behaviour, and some may limit what they communicate of their research due to its themes (Barlow & Awan, 2016, Mangset et al. 2021). This can affect engagement and social media statistics.

The Altmetric donut, with total score in the middle: The Altmetric donut with a total "altmetric score". The colours signify types of engagement (policy, social media etc).

(image from Altmetric.com)

For an in-depth guide to Altmetrics, see Miles & Price (2023). Using Altmetric data responsibly: A guide to interpretation and good practice [White paper]. LIS-Bibliometrics Community. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/116448