Letter to the Editor: On the conceptualisation and theorisation of the impact caused by publications

Haustein et al. (Theories of informetrics: a Festschrift in honor of Blaise Cronin, in press) have linked up with a long tradition in scientometrics in publishing an attempt at a conceptual-theoretical reflection of the “impact” concept in bibliometrics and altmetrics. The very interesting publication by Haustein et al. (Theories of informetrics: a Festschrift in honor of Blaise Cronin, in press) is taken as an opportunity in this letter to the editor, in the first part to discuss the classification of article-level metrics, and in the second the theoretical reflection of “impact”.