<P> As early as 2004, the BMJ published the number of views for its articles, which was found to be somewhat correlated to citations . In 2008 the Journal of Medical Internet Research began publishing views and Tweets . These "tweetations" proved to be a good indicator of highly cited articles, leading the author to propose a "Twimpact factor", which is the number of Tweets it receives in the first seven days of publication, as well as a Twindex, which is the rank percentile of an article's Twimpact factor . </P> <P> In response to growing concerns over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors in evaluating scientific outputs and scientists themselves, Université de Montréal, Imperial College London, PLOS, eLife, EMBO Journal, The Royal Society, Nature and Science proposed citation distributions metrics as alternative to impact factors . </P> <P> Open access publications are available without cost to readers, hence they should be cited more frequently . While this has been contradicted by some experimental and observational studies recent evidence suggests that OA journals were indeed found to have significantly more citations overall compared to non-OA journals (median 15.5 vs 12). Thus, it is better to publish in an OA journal for more citations . </P> <P> An important recent development in research on citation impact is the discovery of universality, or citation impact patterns that hold across different disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities . For example, it has been shown that the number of citations received by a publication, once properly rescaled by its average across articles published in the same discipline and in the same year, follows a universal log - normal distribution that is the same in every discipline . This finding has suggested a universal citation impact measure that extends the h - index by properly rescaling citation counts and resorting publications, however the computation of such a universal measure requires the collection of extensive citation data and statistics for every discipline and year . Social crowdsourcing tools such as Scholarometer have been proposed to address this need . Kaur et al. proposed a statistical method to evaluate the universality of citation impact metrics, i.e., their capability to compare impact fairly across fields . Their analysis identifies universal impact metrics, such as the field - normalized h - index . </P>

What is a good number of citations for an article