Does research need new measuring sticks? The Nature Network group 'Citation in Science' (http://tinyurl.com/6afj8a) hopes to find common ground among researchers, funders, information providers and others concerning the measures of research output.

Allan Sudlow of the British Library lists common ways in which citations are manipulated or otherwise abused. 'The art of counting', a post by Nature product developer Ian Mulvany, is a useful account of how the impact factor and the H-index are calculated, and concludes that there are many growing areas of contribution such as blogs and open data sets that, at present, are ignored by such metrics. Another post explores whether the number of times an article is downloaded from the Internet could be more informative than its citation counts.

Biologist David Colquhoun of University College London argues that publication metrics are inappropriate for assessing people: “The pressure to produce cheap headline-grabbing work will be enormous. The long-term reputation of UK science will surely be damaged by this sort of bean-counting approach.”