Do altmetrics work for assessing research quality?

Alternative metrics (aka altmetrics) are gaining increasing interest in the scientometrics community as they can capture both the volume and quality of attention that a research work receives online. Nevertheless, there is limited knowledge about their effectiveness as a mean for measuring the impact of research if compared to traditional citation-based indicators. This work aims at rigorously investigating if any correlation exists among indicators, either traditional (i.e. citation count and h -index) or alternative (i.e. altmetrics) and which of them may be effective for evaluating scholars. The study is based on the analysis of real data coming from the National Scientific Qualification procedure held in Italy by committees of peers on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research.