San Francisco, CA, USA
Today, the open-access publisher the Public Library of Science PLoS;
www.plos.org), announces the release of an expanded set of article-level
metrics
on its scientific and medical journal articles (some 14,000 articles across
7 titles*). The article-level metrics program was launched in March 2009,
and with today=92s addition of online usage data, PLoS is transparently
providing an unprecedented set of information on every published article.
Such
information will be of value to researchers, readers, funders,
administrators and anyone interested in the evaluation of scientific
research.
The PLoS article metrics include the new online usage data (HTML page views=
,
PDF downloads and XML downloads) that are compliant with the industry
standard, COUNTER 3.0 http://www.projectcounter.org/code_practice.html, as
well as citation counts, comments, ratings, social bookmarks and blog
coverage. Usage data will be updated daily and currently include more than
four years of statistics from all seven peer-reviewed PLoS journals. With
this growing and detailed set of metrics on every article, PLoS aims to
demonstrate that individual articles can be judged on their own merits
rather
than on the basis of the journal in which they are published.
Because very few data have previously been made public by scholarly
publishers, visitors to the journal sites will need help to understand thes=
e
data.
For example, it is clear from the PLoS data that online usage is dependent
on the age of the article, as well its subject area. In order to place the
new usage data in context, PLoS is therefore providing summary tables to
allow users to see how an article compares with various average measures.
For
anyone wishing to examine the data in detail the complete raw data set is
also available as a download.
PLoS is still in the early stages of the article-level metrics program, but
this is the first attempt by a major publisher to place such a broad range
of data on each article. PLoS therefore hopes that the provision of these
data will encourage other publishers to make such data available, which wil=
l
lead ultimately to broader improvements in scholarly communication and
research assessment.
Further information can be found in this blog
http://www.plos.org/cms/node/485, these Frequently Asked Questions
(http://www.plos.org/about/faq.html#metrics), this explanatory website or
you can direct your specific question toalm@plos.org.
To see examples of articles with a broad range of article-level metrics,
look at the =91Impact=92 tab of
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/metrics/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0=
030104
and
http://www.plosone.org/article/metrics/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.000044=
3
.
* Please note that currently usage data are only displayed for articles
published after June 17th, 2005, which comprise more than 90% of published
articles, and we aim to provide the data for the remaining articles in the
near future.
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