Update to PLoS Article-Level Metrics Data

As you may be aware, as part of our ongoing article-level metrics program, we provide a downloadable Excel file for the entire dataset (3 Mb zipped, but 35 Mb when unzipped). The first such file was created when we launched the usage data (in September 2009) and we have just updated it with the latest data (with data correct up to January 31st 2010). Going forwards, we plan to update this spreadsheet every other month, starting in April.

The main changes with this latest version (other than containing a more recent dataset) are:

• The addition of the ‘missing’ usage data for all our articles.
  • We now have a complete usage dataset for all articles, going back to day of publication (previously some articles missed the usage data for their early years)
• The addition of data from researchblogging.org. Researchblogging.org are a blog aggregating service and we now include their data as part of the article-level metrics data set (as described in an earlier post)
• An update to the various  journal level summary tables

Some people have already started analysing our data and we encourage anyone who is interested to take this dataset and do their own analysis. Also be aware that the ‘live’ data for each article can be accessed by clicking on the link: “Download raw Metrics data as XML” which can be found at the bottom of each article’s Metrics tab.