[Asis-l] Article-Level Metrics At PLoS > Addition Of Usage Data

[gerrymck]

Colleagues/

Major Development by Public Library Of Science (PLoS) and
Article-Level Metrics !

 /Gerry

Submitted by Mark Patterson on Wed, 2009-09-16 11:10.

As part of our ongoing article-level metrics program, we’re delighted
to announce that all seven PLoS journals will now provide online usage
data for published articles. With this addition, the suite of metrics
on PLoS articles now includes measures of: online usage; citations
from the scholarly literature; social bookmarks; blog coverage; and
the Comments, Notes and ‘Star’ ratings that have been made on the
article.

[snip]

PLoS has therefore embarked on a program to aggregate a range of
available data about an article and place that data on the article
itself. The data are found on the new tab called ‘Metrics’, available
on all articles. A reader can now scan the various metrics to
determine the extent to which the article has been viewed, cited,
covered in the media and so forth. With the addition of usage data to
the article-level metrics we have taken another step towards providing
the community with valuable data that can be used and analyzed.

 [snip]

In order to make article-level metrics as open and useful as possible,
we are providing our entire dataset as a downloadable spreadsheet and
we encourage interested researchers to download the data and perform
their own analyses.

[snip]

It’s also important to emphasize that online usage should not be seen
as an absolute indicator of quality for any given article, and such
data must be interpreted with caution. To provide additional context
and to aid interpretation, we have provided a series of summary tables
indicating the average usage of categories of article (grouped by age,
journal and topic area).

 Links to A Zipped Downloadable Spreadsheet Of The Entire Dataset,
Summary of Tables Indicating The Average Usage Of Categories Of
Article (Grouped By Age, Journal And Topic Area),FAQ, And A Background
Posting, Etc. Are Available At

[ http://tinyurl.com/ph85db  ]

 /Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu

“Is There Knowledge We Are Not Meant To Know?”