Metrics are important. They measure our influence in our communities; they are used to evaluate the performance of ourselves, our departments, and our peers. Therefore, ensuring that we collect relevant measures and contextualize them appropriately is important.
Citation-based metrics have been the traditional benchmarks for success in academia. The most familiar citation-based metrics include the Journal Impact Factor and the Hirsch Index, although there are many other citation-based measures that can provide insights to the value of published works and assist with academic benchmarking, such as article-level metrics.
Increasingly, research impact has become greater than citation-based metrics alone. We are seeing that traditional metrics give incomplete picture of impact, missing newer forms of use such as page views and download counts, mentions and saves. Altmetrics are stepping up to fill in these gaps, and they are becoming more and more mainstream.
