Article Citations are an Insufficient Building Block for Measuring Research Impact in the Twenty-First Century

Article citations indicate a possible connection between any of number of ambiguously-identified authors to an unspecified number of ambiguously-identified authors of the cited manuscript, for an unspecified reason, in recognition of unspecified contributions, and for motivations that are not transparent; while totally excluding non-manuscript related contributions. On this basis we generate and use derivative measures of “impact” that are reported as accurate to three decimal places and use the result to evaluate careers of millions of researchers and direct billions of dollars in annual investment. Can we do better?