Traditional bibliometrics include qualitative assessment (peer review, grants received, awards granted, patents issued) and quantitative measures (publications count, citations count, h-index, journal impact factor). Citation analysis is the examination of an individual publication (or a group of publications) based on counting how often it has been cited by subsequent publications. It is assumed that a high citation count demonstrates a significant quality and impact of an article. The citation analysis is used to:
The h-index measures the author's impact based on the set of the most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications, e.g. an h-index of 45 means that an author has written 45 papers which have each received at least 45 citations. First introduced by by Jorge E. Hirsch in 2005, the h-index is included in Web of Science and Google Scholar.
The journal impact factor measures the influence of a journal based on how often its articles are cited by authors. It can be found in Journal Citation Reports. There are other emerging journal ranking tools: Eigenfactor, Google Scholar Metrics, SCImago and Journal Metrics (both used by Scopus).
Altmetrics are methods that attempt to help researchers to explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products, from traditional ones like journal articles, to new inputs like blog posts, datasets, or slides. It is an emerging field with a number of tools, e.g. Impact Story
Article-Level Metrics (ALM) is a value added measure of the impact at the article level including new mentions such as at blogs, tweets, social bookmarking in addition to usage count and citations. The Public Library of Science was the originator of Article-Level Metrics in 2009.
The Altmetric Bookmarklet offers researchers to install the article level metrics of the recent papers for free.