As of last week, Nature now provides a real-time online count of article-level metrics for its published research papers. Citation data, news mentions, blog posts and details of sharing through social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, will be available for every research article published since last year.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) hopes that the information will be of interest to readers, as well as feeding into the evolving debate about alternative ways to evaluate scientific output. The 2014 Research Excellence Framework exercise to assess UK research quality, for instance, will look at article citations and consider other measures for tracking research impact.

The information is available for 20 NPG journals published on nature.com, including the Nature research journals, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports.