Introduction Altmetrics is a new and emerging scholarly tool that measures online attention surrounding journal articles. Altmetric data resources include: policy documents, news outlets, blogs, online reference managers (eg Mendeley and CiteULike), post-publication peer-review forums (eg PubPeer and Publons), social media (eg Twitter, Facebook, Weibo, Google(+), Pinterest, Reddit), Wikipedia, sites running Stack Exchange (Q&A), and reviews on F1000 and YouTube.Methods To identify the top 50 dental articles in 2014, PubMed was searched using the following query "("2014/1/1"[PDAT]:"2014/12/31"[PDAT]) and jsubsetd[text]" in December, 2015. Consequently, all PubMed records were extracted and sent to Altmetric LLP (London, UK) as a CSV file for examination. Data were analysed by Microsoft Office Excel 2010 using descriptive statistics and charts.Results Using PubMed searches,15,132 dental articles were found in 2014. The mean Altmetric score of 50 top dental articles in 2014 was 69.5 ± 73.3 (95% CI: -74.14 to 213.14). The British Dental Journal (48%) and Journal of Dental Research (16%) had the maximum number of top articles. Twitter (67.13%), Mendeley (15.89%) and news outlets (10.92%) were the most popular altmetric data resources.Discussion Altmetrics are intended to supplement bibliometrics, not replace them. Altmetrics is a fresh and emerging arena for the dental research community. We believe that dental clinical practitioners, research scientists, research directors and journal editors must pay more attention to altmetrics as a new and rapid tool to measure the social impact of scholarly articles.