Arguments can be made that article-level metrics are more relevant to a digital environment, better measures for researchers in smaller disciplines, and more equitable measures for researchers publishing in open access or non-western publications.
In an evolving publishing landscape, article-level metrics can contribute to a more complete picture of reach and impact.
Times cited, or citation counts, refers to how many times your article has been cited by other works.
NOTE: It's important to remember that this number will change depending on the "universe" of information in which the article is indexed. (For example, an article may have been cited 4 times in Web of Science and 8 times in Google Scholar; those citations might come from different articles or the same articles.)
A Google Scholar profile displays article citation counts as well your total author citation counts:
Publishers will often supply authors with reports on downloads, or how many times an article was downloaded from their platform. These reports may incorporate geographical data on where downloads have occurred, chronological data broken into months or days, and trend data.
Publishers and databases may supply page-view data. A page-view captures when a reader has viewed the article but has not downloaded it. Page-view data is more common in large open-access resources like Pubmed Central and PLOS.
Increasingly, articles are being discussed in scholarly communities and on social media. Data about posts and shares can demonstrate the extent to which an article has generated discussion.
The Altmetric Bookmarklet is a browser plug-in that provides scholarly community and social media data on a given article.
NOTE: articles must have a DOI to retrieve metrics.
