PLOS One to publish alternative "impact" data
Maxine Clarke
Wednesday, 21 January 2009 12:58 UTC
From The Scientist blog (19 Jan):
In an attempt to provide alternative metrics to the traditional journal impact factor, the open-access journal Public Library of Science ONE announced that it will release a slew of alternative impact data about individual articles in the coming months.
The new “articles-level metrics project” — which will post usage data, page views, citations from Scopus and CrossRef, social networking links, press coverage, comments, and user ratings for each of PLoS ONE’s thousands of articles — was announced yesterday (Jan. 18) by Peter Binfield, the journal’s managing editor, at the ScienceOnline’09 conference in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
“No one has any data other than [ISI] impact factors,” Binfield told The Scientist. “Our idea is to throw up a bunch of metrics and see what people use.” ……
Eventually, Binfield hopes that readers will be able to personalize how they view the data, and sort articles according to the metric of their choice. “The more metrics we have, the more it’ll lead to a dilution of any one [metric],” said Bjoern Brembs, a neuroscientist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany and member of PLoS ONE’s editorial board.
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Replies
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One response to The Scientist’s post:
DemandFactor at Journal of Vision
by Andrew Watson
[Comment posted 2009-01-20 12:39:24]
We applaud the effort by PLoS One to introduce new metrics to help readers and authors judge the value and impact of individual articles. At the open-access online Journal of Vision, we have since May 2007 offered detailed usage statistics for individual articles (http://journalofvision.org/7/7/i/). These include a measure ? DemandFactor ? that attempts to summarizes the download activity for an individual article. PLoS ONE might consider including this among their metrics. Whatever the precise measures adopted, we hope and expect that metrics of this kind will be of great value to readers, authors, and science administrators.
Andrew B. Watson
Editor-in-Chief
Journal of Vision http://journalofvision.org -
I applaud this step by PLOS One. ISI impact factor has ruled without reason, a good competition is always good for health :-)
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