A lunchtime conversation with a colleague had us both bemoaning the distorting influence on chemistry of bibliometrics, h-indices and journal impact factors, all very much a modern phenomenon of scientific publishing. Young academics on a promotion fast-track for example are apparently advised not to publish in a well-known journal devoted to organic chemistry because of its apparently “low” impact factor.

The other day I was alerted to an interesting evaluation of international citation data. The author, Curt Rice, mentions a particular aspect of the data: In 2000, 25% of Norwegian articles remained uncited in their first four years of life. By 2009, this had fallen to about 15%. This shows that the “bottom” isn’t pulling the average down. In fact, it’s raising it, making more room for the top to pull us even higher.

Ideas on measuring the "impact" of a natural history collection have been bubbling along, as reflected in recent comments on iPhylo, and some offline discussions I've been having with David Blackburn and Alan Resetar.My focus has been at the specimen-level, with a view to motivation the adoption of persistent specimen-level identifiers so that we can citations of specimens over time (e.g., in publications and databases such as GenBank). Not only

This is an edited version of the text that I spoke from at the Altmetrics Workshop in Koblenz in June. Impact as re-use and the way it enables us to reframe the argument around the impact and dissemination of curiosity driven research.