Towards a New Appoach in Scientific Impact Analysis Article Level Metrics and an Application in Turkey

Journal Impact Factor (IF), designed initially for the assessment of relative quality of scientificjournals, is being used recently also to assess the impact of individual articles and their authors. But,IF is increasingly being questioned regarding its suitability for that purpose. Therefore alternative approachesstarted to appear which make use of the interactive capabilities of web technology. These arecalled article level metrics. During the last few years, some of the international publishers of scientificjournals have initiated services which provide this kind of metrics. It would not be wrong to assume thatthe article level metrics will gain importance in the future in line with the growing need for a reliablemethod of assessing the quality of individual works. This article deals with this issue within the frameworkof kaynakca.info, a web based reference management service that provides these metrics in Turkey. It ishoped that this work would lead to a serious questioning of existing practices of impact assessment basedalmost solely on citation counts.