Inside Higher Ed, New Measures of Scholarly Impact:

Higher education might be a high-end marketplace of ideas, but its mechanisms for taking inventory for that marketplace have been, until recently, relatively basic. The method for measuring the influence of journals and authors by counting the number of times their articles are cited by other articles — called the “impact factor” — has hardly changed since 1955, when it was created by Eugene Garfield, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student …

But the way researchers read journal articles has changed, especially in the sciences. “If you look at the traffic, it’s pretty clear that most scholarly communications is consumed online, not in print,” says Johan Bollen, an associate professor of informatics at the Indiana University at Bloomington.

Bollen is principal investigator for MESUR (Metrics for Scholarly Usage of Resources), a project founded in 2006 on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that is trying to shift how scholarly impact is measured away from citations — which he describes as inherently “backwards-looking … kind of like astronomers looking at a galaxy whose light reaches us 50 million years after the events that cause that light to happen” — and toward the sort of real-time usage metrics that Web-based consumption enables.

“If you look at the role citations have played in scholarly assessment, it’s very clear that citations originated when most scholarly publications are printed and consumed via print,” Bollen says.

These days, the availability of “usage data” — information on how many times a digital article has been downloaded, and in what context — means that people like Bollen can track the spread of an idea in a scholarly community using the same principles that epidemiologists use to track the spread of a virus in a village. Usage data do not just mean how many times an article is downloaded; they also mean breaking down the browsing patterns of researchers using the scholarly literature. … Now that so much journal consumption is digital, the MESUR team is confident that its analysis paints a pretty good picture of influence in the scholarly community writ large, not just a tiny subset.

For our take on the role of alternatives other than citation counts to measure the influence of legal scholarship, see Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006).