PLoS releases metrics for all papers

This is pretty cool: the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which publishes a number of open-access top-tier journals (plus PLoS ONE, a not-so-top-tier journal), has just put metrics for all of its articles online. You can now see the number of citations, blog mentions, article views and PDF downloads for every PLoS article, so if you’ve published in one of the PLoS journals, you’re free to go find out just how many times your article’s been viewed compared to everyone else’s. And then you of course you’re free to make up all sorts of convenient excuses for the fact that your stats suck and your paper’s only been viewed seventeen times in the last three years.

What’s even cooler is the PLoS editors have collated all of that information and released it as one monstrous Excel spreadsheet. So you can now run off and do a quick regression analysis to determine whether or not having longer paper titles leads to more citations, if you’re so inclined.

One can only hope that the for-profit publishers follow the PLoS lead and start putting some of this information on-line. Given the widespread availability of things like download counts, bibliometricians (is that a word?) could develop novel measures of impact that go beyond simple citation counts (or derivative measures such as the H-index). You can imagine, for example, a metric that quantifies the “reach” of an article, which could take into account the number of views and downloads but not necessarily the citation count. Or, as some have suggested, one could simply use the download data as a more readily available proxy for citation rates, since it turns out that download counts within the first few months of publication are a strong predictor of citation rates several years later.

Of course, skepticism is probably warranted given the for-profit publishers’ track record of not exactly being eager to do what’s in the best interest of the scientific community. But perhaps other open-access providers (e.g., the Frontiers series) will follow suit…