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After dissemination of research, it’s important to determine its impact within academia and society over time. Responsibly communicating that impact is useful in circumstances such as promotion and tenure and applying for grants and awards. Resources such as the San Franscisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto provide guidelines for how to best communicate research impact.

The impact of research has traditionally been determined by quantitative measures such as h-index, citation counts, and journal evaluation measures. These measures have been most beneficial to and relied upon by STEM, health, and social science disciplines. These measures are generally easy to acquire and typically communicate the academic impact of research.

Alternative metrics do not replace traditional metrics, but are meant to complement them. They are utilized to evaluate research beyond quantitative measures to include qualitative measures and values that benefit all disciplines and areas of research. Alternative metrics are able to communicate societal and economic impact of research that influences areas such as culture, education, and politics.

It's important to remember that metrics, whether traditional or alternative, are quite often inexact across the multitude of tools. Resources are inherently biased as they often lean more towards certain disciplines, types of research outputs, and language. Publishing models do not always consider or include marginalized voices and many disciplines remain minimally diverse in their makeup of researchers. These factors must be kept in mind when locating, interpreting, analyzing, and communicating metrics data.

Metrics Toolkit  - helps scholars and evaluators understand and use citations, web metrics, and altmetrics responsibly in the evaluation of research. The toolkit shows how each metric is calculated, where to locate it, and how each should (and should not) be applied.

Scopus and Web of Science - subscription databases that provide citation counts, h-index, and journal evaluation measures for scholarly works indexed within them.