How a scholar's work is viewed by colleagues via subsequent citation represents only part of its impact. An intriguing addition to the measure of a scholar's work can be tracked as it is mentioned in the news, blogs, tweets, posts, or policy. There is a societal impact and for now, it's been dubbed "alternative metrics." In addition, online social networks of scholars (such as Mendeley) can track important exchanges of information. For now, the metrics from online social networks are also considered to be alternative metrics. These metrics are focused on the article level regardless of the publishing venue.
Altmetric Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. They can include (but are not limited to) peer reviews on Faculty of 1000, citations on Wikipedia and in public policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream media coverage, bookmarks on reference managers like Mendeley, and mentions on social networks such as Twitter.
Kudos is an easy to use tool to generate descriptions of your work for the general reader via social media
SciVal enables you to visualize research performance, benchmark relative to peers, develop collaborative partnerships and analyze research trends
VOSviewer is a tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks