Photo: Todd Chandler 
The assessment of research is an important part of today's university world: research (RAE) and publications are evaluated in universities and research departments by university administration, single researchers and external evaluators among others.
Countries, universities, research groups, scientific fields, connections between researchers, journals, citation practices
By qualitative (Publication Forum JUFO, expert assessment) and quantitative methods (number of citations, various indicators like impact factor and h-index, ranking lists, bibliographies)
The quality of research and number of publications are basis for allocating basic funding for universities in Finland but also a researcher might need different bibliometric indicators when applying for a job or a grant.
The scientific field concerned with measuring scholarly publications, authors and citations by quantitative methods is called bibliometrics. Bibliometric analysis focuses on the number of publications and evaluates their academic value by the number of citations they have received.
Altmetrics is a branch of bibliometrics that measures the impact of a publication by tracking its visibility in social media and other online services and networks. In Scopus, for example, altmetric data includes the publication's readership counts in Elsevier's reference management software Mendeley.
You can track the online visibility of articles in different services:
Research assessment shapes and guides research, thus the entire research community must acknowledge the purpose of the principles and practices of research evaluation. There is a time and place for various indicators and metrics, but they often measure only one aspect and should not be used solely when quality is evaluated.
