Altmertirc is emerged as one of metrics of research impact, my question is how such initatives will change the judegement of research impact, and to what extenet such new metrices will be more fair in judeging the research impact.
None of these numerical measures are perfect, we have to give them the credibility they deserve though. Most of the measures that try to measure the impact of research were inspired by attempting the problem in various angles. Therefore, I am not sure whether it is possible to compare Altmetrics with citation-based measures. They both have pros and cons. Either Altmetrics are not perfect. As they have advantages over traditional citation-based measures, they also have disadvantages that cannot find with traditional measures. The most important point is our understanding on where they perform well and where they do not.
I agree with Manjula. I would add that the problem of impact is not the same as measuring impact. In essence there is really only one tool in the tool box and it is a numerical measure of how often a piece of research is used or referred to on the web or in various web tools such as Mendeley readers. I think when you talk about impact you need to define carefully what you mean. I should mention that their is a new measure called Dimensions that combines citation and altmetric scores [ https://www.dimensions.ai ]. You might also note that altmetrics measure the immediate impact of a publication because it uses social media (which is fairly easily manipulated) and that citations measure longer term impact and that these two are not always correlated. BW Matt
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