From impact factors to Altmetrics: What numbers are important in publishing your paper?

Abstract

The volume of published research articles has increased exponentially over the past number of years, especially since many journals have transitioned to online open (free) access journal articles only. For this reason, it is important that academics, clinicians and researchers can quantify the impact and quality of the articles they are reading and publishing. It can become challenging to keep up to date with all of the terminology used to capture article and journal metrics. In this editorial we will present an overview of traditional metrics and newer, alternative metrics (Altmetrics) of article success and impact.