This paper picks up some recent developments in scientometrics in terms of altmetrics and analyzes their relevance for monitoring educational research. Altmetrics aim at measuring scientific effects of social media communication and have been discussed as alternative metrics promising the extension of current citation-based impact factors (Priem et al., 2010). Concerning transdisciplinary research aspects (Koier & Horlings, 2015) of educational research, various potentials have been articulated. Altmetrics address societal progress (Bornmann, 2014a, Bornmann, 2014b) by involving the extra-scientific world and extend the range of research products for scientific evaluation (Bornmann, 2014b, Bornmann, 2015; Priem, 2014; Zahedi et al., 2014). On the other hand, a series of related limitations have been articulated ranging from coverage, consistency and traceability of data sources and aggregators (Chamberlain, 2013; Zahedi, Fenner, & Costas, 2014, Zahedi, Fenner, & Costas, 2015) to the dependency on communication and publication practices of different scientific communities (Costas, Zahedi, & Wouters, 2014; Peters et al., 2014; Zahedi et al., 2014). The transdisciplinary field of educational research is used as a case study to get a first insight into how current altmetric tools cover the field on the levels of its general publication output, and on the level of relevant journals. Additionally, we present an experimental approach targeting the Twitter mentions of a transdisciplinary research report.

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