New impact metric

Written byElie Dolgin

| 2 min read

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 linkurl:Scopus;http://info.scopus.com/ and linkurl:CrossRef,;http://www.crossref.org/ social networlking links, press coverage, comments, and user ratings for each of __PLoS ONE__'s thousands of articles -- was announced yesterday (Jan. 18) by linkurl:Peter Binfield,;=http://www.plos.org/about/people/one.html the journal's managing editor, at the linkurl:ScienceOnline'09;http://www.scienceonline09.com/ 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." From its inception at the end of 2006, __PLoS ONE__ has eschewed the notion of impact factors. (It is not currently listed by the ISI Web of Science's rankings.) Binfield argued that the traditional impact factor judges a journal's overall performance, rather than assessing impact at the article-level. The new scheme, however, is aimed at evaluating each article on its own merits, regardless of the other papers in the same journal, he said. __PLoS ONE__ doesn't plan to crunch the data itself, though. "We're not being arrogant enough to make our own metric," said Binfield. Rather, he hopes that the journal's readers will use the information to come to their conclusions. "We're putting the data out there and letting the world figure it out." 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 linkurl:Bjoern Brembs,;http://bjoern.brembs.net/ a neuroscientist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany and member of __PLoS ONE__'s editorial board.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Impact factors and publishing research;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13247/
[16th September 2002]*linkurl:PLoS plans to publish its own journals;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/19886/
[7th September 2001]*linkurl:Long-term vs. short-term journal impact: Does it matter?;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/17900/
[2nd February 1998] *linkurl:Dispelling a few common myths about journal citation impacts;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/17383/
[3rd February 1997]

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