PLoS ONE’s Media Tracking Project
Everyday we find PLoS ONE papers in the news. Whether it’s a science blogger in the United Kingdom, an online newspaper in China, or a national news channel in the United States, we see a lot of media coverage on our research articles. In an effort to better track the coverage these papers receive, we’ve begun a Media Tracking Project.
The aim of this project is to collect all pertinent news articles from legitimate media outlets and research blogs covering PLoS ONE articles. So, how does it work? From now on, we’ll attempt to bookmark relevant news articles and blog posts about PLoS ONE articles using Diigo (a collaborative research and social content site). If you would like to see the articles we’ve collected so far, check out our library. On a weekly basis, we’ll collate these bookmarks and list the relevant media coverage in the commenting section of each research article. An example of the media coverage comment can be found on the article: Scientists Want More Children.
We recognize that – despite our best efforts to track media coverage – we will inevitably miss some (and we will not aim to exhaustively list all sources which simply re-print a standard release for any given article). So, we would encourage you to participate as well. If you read, write, see or hear media coverage on a PLoS ONE article, please don’t hesitate to link to it in the comments section of the paper. Our suggested format is as follows:
Publication:
Title of article:
Link:
For an excellent example of an author documenting media coverage, take a look at the article, Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees. Jonathan Eisen, one of the authors of this manuscript, has meticulously posted links to media coverage in the comments section of his paper. We appreciate his involvement and encourage authors to follow his lead.
In the meantime, we’ll still post PLoS ONE News and Blog Round-Ups of the most widely covered articles on a regular basis.