Better measure of scientific impact;: #PLoS Introduces article level metrics ---

This rocks - PLoS has introduced article level metrics for papers in PLoS journals (Article-level metrics at PLoS – addition of usage data | Public Library of Science). More detail can be found at this page which says

"The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is the first publisher to place transparent and comprehensive information about the usage and reach of published articles onto the articles themselves, so that the entire academic community can assess their value. We call these measures for evaluating articles ‘Article-Level Metrics‘, and they are distinct from the journal-level measures of research quality that have traditionally been made available until now."

And of course, like most others, I went straight to some of my own papers to see how they were doing. But never mind that, one of the more interesting things in the comparison of different topic areas (see Summary Tables here).

Types of information they are collecting and providing include article usage statistics, citations from the scholarly literature, social bookmarks, comments, notes, blog posts and rating ... and more is coming ... a good step in the direction of measuring the impact of articles not journals ....