PLoS and the new Metrics

This week I am looking at the Article Level Metrics recently implemented at PloS and what the might mean for the journal publishing world. One of the sublime pleasures of closely watching a growing field is how quickly the terrain can change.

In the tradition model of academic publishing the key metric to a “successful” article was the number of times it was cited in the literature. It should be noted here what a very poor metric this is to judge the influence of an article, the information that is contained in the publication could be well, suspect but if it provokes conversation or is used as a counter example then it will still be cited and still be seen as influential when counting citations. While perhaps there is no system that is perfect it is obvious that this traditional model could use a bit of up-dating.

The folks over at PloS have implemented a new set of article level metrics that go beyond the tradition of counting only citations and have begun counting other ways that articles are accessed and used.

The new metrics count the number of times the article is access, book marks, comments, ratings blog links as well as citation. The ability to collect all of this information is one of the exiting changes that online journals can offer. This collection of way that the journal is used can tell more about the quality of the work than the one dimensional view provided by examining citations alone.

Of course there are some know issues already when it comes to using these new metrics. For the most part PloS is up front about the issues inherent in these metrics and lists the steps that they are taking to address them. We should remember that each of these metrics has strengths and weakness but taken as a whole they reinforce each other and potentially have the power to change the way journals are used.

Now if we can just change the tenure paradigm in tandem.