With over 800,000 journal articles published in 2008 alone, it’s impossible even for experts to read all the peer-reviewed research published in their fields. So how do they choose which articles to read? How do non-experts decide which articles are the most important? Until recently, there really wasn’t an effective way to assess the importance of a given journal article. While Thomson Reuters’ Impact Factor purports to measure the impact of an entire journal, this measure alone can’t say how important a particular article published in a journal is. Most of the articles published even in the most well-regarded journals don’t have especially dramatic impacts.
A new movement is afoot to improve on this system, and ResearchBlogging.org is proud to be a part of it. Instead of assigning ratings to entire journals, “article-level metrics” strives to assess the importance of each individual article published. The highly respected journal publisher PLoS began its article-level metrics initiative with several basic tools in March of 2009. But as PLoS ONE publisher Peter Binfield explained in a recent presentation, their plan included rolling out several more advanced features over the course of the year. Today marks the launch of one such tool, a partnership with ResearchBlogging.org to identify—nearly in real time—well-considered blog posts written about their articles.
ResearchBlogging.org now has over 900 registered bloggers who discuss peer-reviewed research in five different languages. Visitors can find blog posts about research by searching for topics that interest them, or by searching for a particular journal article. The relationship with PLoS allows people reading the original articles on the PLoS site to link directly to blog posts about the article.
Every PLoS article has a “metrics” tab offering several different measures designed to help readers assess its impact. Readers can see how many times the article has been viewed, comments made directly on the article, and a user-generated star-rating. Now for the first time they will also see links to posts in blogs registered and approved by ResearchBlogging.org. Since the site carefully vets every blog and rejects both blogs and individual posts that don’t meet its guidelines, these posts represent the best commentary the internet has to offer about peer-reviewed research, often from experts in the field. This offers an important early means of assessing the impact of an article. While PLoS also counts the number of citations of an article by other peer-reviewed articles, these typically take a minimum of several months to get published, while blog posts about articles often appear within a week of publication—and even on the date of publication, since PLoS offers bloggers the opportunity to see pre-release versions of its articles.
Blogs offer another benefit over some other article-level metrics. As Cameron Neylon and Shirley Wu noted in an article in PLoS Biology, experts may be reluctant to offer comments directly on journal articles, because they often don’t receive academic credit for their remarks. Blog posts on ResearchBlogging.org are eligible to be selected as the Blog Pick of the Month at PLoS ONE, and notable posts are recognized daily with Editor’s Selections on ResearchBlogging.org—all accomplishments that can look impressive on an academic curriculum vitae. ResearchBlogging.org now indexes over 8,000 blog posts, including over 700 citations of PLoS articles, so these incentives appear to be working.
For more information about this new way to assess the impact of journal articles, check out this one-minute demonstration on the PLoS website. There is also a full explanation of article-level metrics on PLoS here.
To register your blog with ResearchBlogging.org and participate in this program, click here.
Neylon, C., & Wu, S. (2009). Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact PLoS Biology, 7 (11) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242