Journal articles, journals, researchers, and institutions can all be evaluated based on the number of published works, both in sheer numbers as well as quality of the published work. Naturally these all interconnect and have an impact upon one another.
It can take years for articles, books, etc. to get published, keep that in mind when tracking citations. Unfortunately, it doesn't all happen at once. As you can see with the visualization below, you can create maps of citations going forward and back in time: citation maps. This is just a small start to what could become large citation map.
Bibliometrics effects a consider amount of people and processes. Bibliometrics affects people and researchers because the number of times individuals are cited can determine tenure and research funding. Furthermore, those journals that have a high impact factor are more popular and will definitely be found in journal collections over other journals that do not have as high of an impact factor. These journals are more popular and tend to have more status within their fields, justified or no.