Scientific Literature and Evaluation Metrics: Impact Factor, Usage Metrics, and Altmetrics.

Evaluating the quality of a scientific article has proven to be an elusive task. The most widely used bibliometric value currently used for this purpose, the journal impact factor, was not originally designed to determine the quality of research in a scientific article. Nevertheless, it has morphed into a surrogate to delineate the quality of a journal and even to represent the quality of individual articles in that that journal.