I recently discussed over coffee with my colleague Riel Tanyag publication metrics and how to measure the impact of knowledge products, a topic only librarians, publishers, web professionals, and Klingons would get excited about. Nonetheless, valuable thoughts and reflections were generated. We discussed the analysis of publication usage, called bibliometrics. That eventually led to a debate on webometrics and cybermetrics, the measurement of web content usage.That is usage data, but not impact.

Once a publication gets downloaded, we need to measure its contribution to the general body of knowledge. Was it read at all after being downloaded? If so, was the publication, a portion of it, or its derivative used to create new knowledge? Was that knowledge propagated? Would the sum of the answers to the questions above be an aggregated indicator of publication impact as opposed to publication usage? — blogs.adb.org/blog