An alternative analysis on the scientific output of Spanish Sociology What can altmetrics tell us?

Abstract: In recent years, new indicators known as altmetrics have been introduced to measure the impact of scientific activity. These indicators are obtained through the mentions realised from different social media, existing several aggregators of these data that collect several of them in the same database, being Altmetric.com the most popular. However, in spite of the popularization of these metrics, several limitations in their use have been manifested. For this reason, rhe objective of this work is twofold: (1) to show the possibilities of altimetric techniques applied to the Spanish social sciences in general and sociology in particular; (2) to critically analyse the results to observe the limitations of these indicators; (3) to check whether they can really add useful information that can be used to describe a scientific field and (4) to see the reasons why altmetrics cannot be applied in these fields.