ALM Wiki

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.

The Ruby application Article-Level Metrics was started in March 2009. It allows a user to aggregate relevant performance data on research articles including online usage, citations, social bookmarks, notes, comments, ratings and blog coverage. We’re continuing to expand the Article-Level Metrics application because we believe that articles should be considered on their own merits, and that the impact of an individual article should not be determined by the journal in which it happened to be published. As a result, we hope that new ways of measuring and evaluating research quality (or ‘impact’) can and will evolve.

We hope that Article-Level Metrics will become a powerful and transparent way of measuring the impact that individual articles have on the scientific and the wider community.

For more information on how PLoS uses Article-Level Metrics, see http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/.

Details

Read the following pages to get started:

• Install
• Capistrano
• Formats
• Development
• Rake
• Sources

Information

• Data Analysis and Evaluation
• Videos
• Past Contributors