Scientific Literature and Evaluation Metrics: Impact Factor, Usage Metrics, and Altmetrics

Evaluating the quality of a scientific article has proven to be an elusive task. The most widely used bibliometric value currently used for this purpose, the journal impact factor, was not originally designed to determine the quality of research in a scientific article. Nevertheless, it has morphed into a surrogate to delineate the quality of a journal and even to represent the quality of individual articles in that that journal. Early 21(st) century advances in computer technology have seen an explosive revolution in scientific publication that have included open access, online publication, and world-wide accessibility to these publications. These developments have made it obvious that more sophisticated tools are required to delimit the quality of material present in the scientific literature. Usage data, which is measured as the number of full-text downloads of a specific article, is just one new method to evaluate the source of the vast material available that can be leveraged to more fully evaluate the merit of scientific literature.