Altmetria: métricas alternativas do impacto da comunicação científica

Describes the state of the art of altmetrics, defined as the study, creation and use of measures related to user interaction with diverse research products through the Social Web – views, downloads, citations, reuse, sharing, tagging, comments, among others. To understand the context where altmetrics arises, we explore the Social Web’s specificities and potentials, and the characteristics of scientific communication. Besides being another step on the evolution of metric studies of information, altmetrics also presents itself as a reaction to the crisis in the current model of scientific publication and evaluation. Through an exploratory search in national and international sources we were able to identify the scientific literature about altmetrics, analysing the authors involved, its concepts, the proposals and trends around the theme, basing our reflection about the development of altmetrics and the acceptance of alternative metrics as tools for scientific evaluation. We note that altmetrics is an expanding area, and its methods complement traditional metrics contributing to a more complete understanding of scientific communication, its actors, processes, products and impacts