PLoS - Public Library of Science

PLoS Journals – measuring impact where it matters!


"Novas formas de medir o impacto dos artigos agora disponíveis nas revistas de open acess da
PLoS - Public Library of Science".

A few months ago, PLoS initiated a program to provide a series of metrics on the individual articles published in all the PLoS Journals. You can see some examples here, here, here and here. There are two complementary benefits to the new approach.

First, we are focusing on articles rather than journals. The dominant paradigm for judging the worth of an article is to rely on the name and the impact factor of the journal in which the work is published. But it’s well known that there is a strong skew in the distribution of citations within a journal – typically, around 80% of the citations accrue to 20% of the articles. So the impact factor is a very poor predictor of how many citations any individual article will obtain, and in any case, journal editors and peer reviewers don’t always make the right decision. Indicators at the article level circumvent these limitations, allowing articles to be judged on their own scientific merits.

Second, we are not confining article-level metrics to a single indicator. As summarized by Michael Jensen, and discussed by many others including recently over at the Scholarly Kitchen, there’s a lot more to scientific impact than citations in the selection of journals covered by the Web of Science – the proprietary source of data that provides the impact factor calculation. Citations can be counted more broadly, along with web usage, blog and media coverage, social bookmarks, expert/community comments and ratings, and so on. Our own efforts are so far confined to citations (as measured by Scopus and PubMed Central), social bookmarks (as made by users of Connotea and CiteULike), and blog coverage (as recorded by Bloglines, Postgenomic and Nature Blogs), and these metrics will be improved and expanded over the coming months. The good news is that many of these indicators can be collated automatically, using openly available web tools that constantly update information on the article itself.

Mais informação em: http://www.plos.org/cms/node/478