New Twitter Functionality on PLoS ONE

Recently, we added a nice new functionality to the PLoS ONE site. On the homepage, you will now see a ‘twitter’ widget in the right hand column (to the right of the “In the News” block). Whenever anyone issues a tweet with the words ‘PLoS ONE’ or ‘#PLoSONE’ in the text then their tweet will appear in the list here.

In addition, we also have the same functionality operating at the article level. The widget is able to display tweets about a particular article by looking for the article DOI appearing in an ‘unpacked’ URL. If there are no tweets for a particular article, it will not appear.

The paper, Inner Speech during Silent Reading Reflects the Reader’s Regional Accent, is a nice example of this widget in use.

We should point out that this handy widget has a few limitations.  For one, the widget isn’t able to store tweets for all eternity.  It will only be able to show recent tweets. Also, it isn’t connected to our Article Level Metrics …yet (we’re working on it though).

Otherwise, we think this widget will make a nice new addition to our site and will be a helpful way to see what our community is saying.