But isn't the reason they don't want to write it up because they know they won't get any credit for it? That is exactly what this is trying to remedy
Sometimes it is just the count the number of published papers, or that dividing by the number of authors, or some weight if you are the first or the last author.
Number of citations, h-index, ...
About the journal, there is the impact factor and many somewhat arbitrary ranks...
A paper in a totally obscure journal that is not cited by other papers, has the same weight than a blog post.