Article level metrics are now available on twenty journals on nature.com, Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) publishing platform. Nature.com users can now view an article’s citation data, page views, news mentions, blog posts and social shares including Facebook and Twitter. This enhanced functionality went live today on Nature, the Nature research journals and Nature Communications, and is also available on Scientific Reports. Article level metrics are available on research articles published since 2011 and are openly accessible to all.
“These metrics transparently show the impact and reach of articles published in our journals, enable evaluation, and help readers see what others find interesting and notable,” said Kira Anthony, Editorial Development Manager, NPG. “The interest in both traditional metrics and ‘altmetrics’ from the research community is clear, and NPG is pleased to offer this improved functionality and service to our readers and authors. Institutions, funders and those mining data are also beginning to look at this information, for example for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) evaluation in the UK. Some REF panels will look at article citations and consider other measures of tracking research impact.”
Citation data is pulled from Web of Science, CrossRef and Scopus and is updated daily. The counts for each article link out to a citation list. Page views on nature.com are updated daily. Readers can see total views (HTML+PDF) of the article, and track the cumulative count on a given day using an interactive graph. Page view data only reflect usage on the nature.com journal platform and are only for articles published on or after 1 January 2012.
News, blog posts, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit bookmarks data, are provided by Altmetric and updated hourly using Altmetric’s application programming interface (API). Altmetric is supported by Digital Science, a Macmillan company focused on technology to aid scientific research. Blog and Google+ lists link out to the original posts, and news links out to the original article. To be included, third party news pieces must contain a link to the relevant article on nature.com. A world map shows the number of tweets per country.
“We’re pleased to see Altmetric data integrated onto nature.com,” said Euan Adie, Founder of Altmetric. “NPG joins a growing number of publishers using the Altmetric API to enrich their article level metrics. Pulling together all of the online discussions about a paper enables scientists to see what their peers find interesting, and authors can quantify the attention their articles are receiving.”
