  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.
