Square One   …travelling but never arriving

“Something has just happened that will almost certainly end the tyranny of impact factors and may well mark another step towards the extinction of most scientific journals,” writes Richard Smith triumphantly in his latest blog post on BMJ. He continues:

It was the appearance of something called rather clunkily “Article-Level Metrics.” These are a variety of scores and other bits of information attached to each article in the publications of the Public Library of Science. They shift attention from journals to articles, particularly for the academic bean counters anxious to find a convenient and low cost way of ranking academics.

Richard Smith concludes, after explaining that Article-Level Metrics works by tracking each article’s online usage including citations from scholarly literature, social bookmarks, comments left by readers, notes left within articles, blog posts, and ratings, saying:

Increasingly governments and research funders are interested not just in the number of times an article is cited in other publications (an incestuous and self serving measure) but on the impact they have in the real world, the changes they lead to.

So that’s why article level metrics might doom the impact factor, but why might they signal an end to many journals? It’s because they lead to articles rather than journals being what matters, and the articles can then be published quickly on databases rather than in journals…

The edifice of journals is beginning to crack—and not before time.

The full post that does justice to how the Article-Level Metrics works is here.

The Public Library of Science gives a background explanation of the Article-Level Metrics here and here, where Mark Patterson was wise enough to remind us that:

It’s also important to emphasize that online usage should not be seen as an absolute indicator of quality for any given article, and such data must be interpreted with caution.

There is an example of how the Article-Level Metrics statistics and graph look here.