Efforts to develop and apply impact or influence evaluation metrics will persist due to the intense competition for funding among researchers, coupled with the limited resources available. These efforts are, in many ways, both inevitable and necessary.
Challenges arise when these metrics are used without fully understanding the assumptions behind them or the limited and often distorted information they provide.
The search for a practical "second best" method of measuring impact often turns to the professional literature as the most reliable available alternative, assuming that scholarly publishing is functioning as it should. However, there are valid reasons to be cautious about this assumption.
If metrics based on published literature lead to the creation of "new" types of documents intended to game or manipulate the metrics, such efforts could ultimately undermine the integrity of the scholarly literature itself.
A good summary of measures mentioned in this guide: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8397294/
