While at the Medical Library Association conference this May, an impromptu forum was organized by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) focused on sharing and soliciting feedback regarding author-level metrics. Like-minded attendees were invited to hear and comment about enhancing the post-publication peer-review process to include other ways to gauge the value of a scientific paper and its impact within the scientific community.

PLoS began a program in March 2009, to place ‘article-level metrics’ on each publication and continues to develop their vision which currently includes such measures as usage statistics, citation counts, trackbacks from blogs, social networks counts (for example CiteULike, Connotea, and Mendeley), and user comments and ratings.  One does have to wonder if a publication has been tweeted X number of times, could there be a correlation to the number of cites the paper receives? Given the nature of the Internet and available communication channels, how else could you measure a paper’s importance?

By focusing attention on the individual research paper, article-level metrics allows papers to be judged on their own scientific merit and the influence these papers have over time can be seen in the usage accruals.

I located an interesting presentation (given in April 2012)  to end this month’s Director’s Reflection post.  While it is close to an hour in length, Pete Binfield, publisher of PLoS One, provides a good overview of the current status of their program and what you might expect in the future.

I for one look forward to monitoring the progress of author-level metrics and sharing this information with our user community.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services