Altmetrics: Social media metrics for a more democratic Science

Abstract Theoretical review of the methods to measure scientific production impact in the area of Metric Studies of Information, focusing on Altmetrics, a more recent approach. The objective of this study is to demonstrate the rise of altmetrics with the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, examining the impact and influence of academic activities in these new online platforms. This study addresses altmetrics' origin, concepts, applications, indicators, data sources, tools, and ways to retrieve information from social media platforms, as well as previous or traditional research metrics. It discusses reasons to use alternative indicators and metrics to measure academic research impact and presents the future perspectives that these metrics are opening. It was concluded that Altmetrics can be considered as alternative complementary metrics to traditional metrics because they can give a fair reflection of citations count or global scholarly impact, resulting in a more democratic science.