  Altmetrics are web-based quantitative impact or attention indicators for
academic articles that have been proposed to supplement citation counts. This
article reports the first assessment of the extent to which mature altmetrics
from Altmetric.com and Mendeley associate with journal article quality. It
exploits expert norm-referenced peer review scores from the UK Research
Excellence Framework 2021 for 67,030+ journal articles in all fields
2014-17/18, split into 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs). The results show that
altmetrics are better indicators of research quality than previously thought,
although not as good as raw and field normalised Scopus citation counts.
Surprisingly, field normalising citation counts can reduce their strength as a
quality indicator for articles in a single field. For most UoAs, Mendeley
reader counts are the best, tweet counts are also a relatively strong indicator
in many fields, and Facebook, blogs and news citations are moderately strong
indicators in some UoAs, at least in the UK. In general, altmetrics are the
strongest indicators of research quality in the health and physical sciences
and weakest in the arts and humanities. The Altmetric Attention Score, although
hybrid, is almost as good as Mendeley reader counts as a quality indicator and
reflects more non-scholarly impacts.
