Scholars, departments, and academic institutions are all interested in quantifying the impact of a scholar's research. Often, measuring research impact focuses on analyzing a researcher's written publications, also known as bibliometrics.
Traditional impact measures have centered on citation analysis, looking at how often and where others have cited a particular research article. These measurements, several of which are discussed under Traditional Citation Metrics, are often equated with the impact or "worth" of a particular article, journal, or author, whether or not this was the intention of the original metric.
In recent years and in response to criticism of traditional metrics, additional types of citation metrics have been suggested to capture the impact of a scholar's work more broadly. These metrics might count how often an article has been downloaded, blogged about, shared on Twitter, or saved to a citation management system like Zotero. More about these alternative metrics can be found under Altmetrics.