Leading journals Nature and BMJ are now offering an article metrics feature to analyze the social media impact of an article. Tweets, blog posts, Facebook shares, news stories, Google+ mentions, page views, and citations from articles are all tabulated and displayed for each article in a graph, shown below.
Click on Article Metrics for most Nature or BMJ articles to view this data. Altmetrics has been defined as the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship. Altmetrics is beginning to be seen as a supplement to peer-review, as online conversations, shares, and bookmarks can be tabulated by the day or week, rather than the slower journal publication cycle. Read more about altmetrics here.