Evaluating altmetrics

The rise of the social web and its uptake by scholars has led to the creation of altmetrics, which are social web metrics for academic publications. These new metrics can, in theory, be used in an evaluative role, to give early estimates of the impact of publications or to give estimates of non-traditional types of impact. They can also be used as an information seeking aid: to help draw a digital library user's attention to papers that have...