Policy makers and administrations have used Scival for years as a decision support resource. As discussed on Twitter, there is an open standard for these metrics: http://www.snowballmetrics.com/

The data are useful to help support decisions about HE policy, though they are more useful in STEM than in the humanities, partly due to the lack of identifiers and comprehensive indexing of outputs in the humanities.

Hopefully that makes it a little less terrifying.