Altmetrics are non-traditional, quantitative indicators as an alternative to more traditional indicators such as the Journal Impact Factor and the H-Index. Some examples of altmetrics are

• number of downloads of your publication
• number of mentions on twitter
• number of times your publication was added to an online reference manager such as Mendeley
• numer of citations in wikipedia and some policy documents

Altmetrics give information on the dissemination of, attention for and impact of your research output.

Several tracking tools for altmetrics are already available. Ghent University made an agreement with Altmetric allowing its researchers to make use of the online tool. More information can be found on the UGent portal: altmetric.