Bloggers and publishers team up December 25, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, dotastronomy, science , trackbackThe post I just wrote on laser guide stars and magnetometers reminded me that I meant to write something about the recently announced collaboration between ResearchBlogging and Public Library of Science (PLoS). PLoS publishes several peer-reviewed journals in the biomedical science and provides open access to all the articles published. In an attempt to move away from journal impact factors in assessing the importance of a paper, PLoS make available a number of article-level metrics, such as ratings, citations, downloads. The most recent addition to these metrics is the integration of the ResearchBlogging portal, to provide links to blog posts that scientists have written about the article, as an added way of measuring an article’s impact. To see how it works, watch the video below.
The biological sciences are way ahead of astronomy in the addition of such “social” features. Some journal websites provide easy linking to bibliographic tools such as CiteULike and social bookmarking sites (Del.ici.ous, StumbleUpon), ADS provide the number of reads and citations for articles, and arxiv supports trackbacks. But on the whole there’s little integration of comments, ratings or links to blog posts.
It would be really nice to see the folks at ADS or the journals integrate more 2.0 features to help us wade through the sea of publications we are expected to keep ahead of. Particularly for junior researchers this extra information would be of particular value. Also, for cross-disciplinary papers such as those published in optics journals, the citation counting in ADS tends not to be representative. I did hope to get a few people from the publishing industry or ADS along to .Astronomy to hear from them what is being done or planned on that front, but that part of the community was not represented in the end. If you have thoughts, ideas or information, drop me a comment.
ResearchBlogging.org comes to PLoS Article-level Metrics from PLoS on Vimeo.
Comments»
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sarah Kendrew, J.J.. J.J. said: SarahAskew » Bloggers and publishers team up http://bit.ly/5Vip1C [...]