Potential Advantages:
- Timeliness
- Supports a broader swath of scholarly contributions
- Encourages openness, sharing, and reuse of scholarship
- Broadens audience, and thus potential impact
Potential Drawbacks:
- Gaming
- Perceptions of “real” impact
- Dynamic nature of social media
- Score comparison
Note: Similar to other metrics, altmetrics does not reveal the quality of a work; that is up to the individual scholar to assess. Quantitative measures are only part of a scholar's impact story.