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"Campuswide there's a little sensitivity toward measuring faculty output," she says. Altmetrics can reveal that nobody's talking about a piece of work, at least in ways that are trackable—and a lack of interest is hardly something researchers want to advertise in their tenure-and-promotion dossiers. "What are the political implications of having a bunch of stuff online that nobody has tweeted about or Facebooked or put on Mendeley?"

"The folks I've talked to are like, 'Yes, it does have some value, but in terms of the reality of my tenure-and-promotion process, I have to focus on other things,'" she says.

As that phrasing indicates, altmetrics data can't reveal everything. Mr. Roberts points out that if someone tweets about a paper, "they could be making fun of it." If a researcher takes the time to download a paper into an online reference manager like Mendeley or Zotero, however, he considers that a more reliable sign that the work has found some kind of audience. "My interpretation is that because they downloaded it, they found it useful," he says.