PLoS Article-Level Metrics: substantial value add for authors

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

Public Library of Science (PLoS) recently introduced 
article-level metrics, as introduced earlier on this list.

The PLoS article-level metrics are a substantial value-add for 
authors, including a range of download statistics, citations and 
social bookmarking data, and more.  As an author, I would love to 
see this kind of service!

It is interesting that a publisher with top-ranking journals on 
traditional metrics (impact factor) is also a publisher 
innovating in the area of metrics of far greater relevance, which 
say soon make impact factors irrelevant in the near future.

One service that I, as an author, would like to see for the 
future, is a means of combining statistics from institutional and 
disciplinary repositories with the publisher's statistics.  This 
is a development that could be pursed either by publishers or by 
repositories.

The data available from PLoS (from the PLoS website) includes: 
- Article usage statistics
- HTML pageviews, PDF downloads and XML downloads
- Citations from the scholarly literature
- currently from PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef Social
   bookmarks
- currently from CiteULike and Connotea Comments
- left by readers of each article Notes
- left by readers of each article Blog posts
- aggregated from Postgenomic, Nature Blogs, and Bloglines
   Ratings left by readers of each article

More information is available at:
http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com