Announcing the Altmetrics Collection

With the increasing use of Web 2.0 tools in scientific publishing and discussion, there is growing concern that scholarly output may be swamping traditional mechanisms for filtering scientific impact, such as peer review (pre-publication filtering) or the journal impact factor (post-publication). In response to this concern, it has become clear that “altmetrics” based on a diverse set of social sources are increasingly likely to provide deeper, richer, and real-time assessments of current and potential scholarly impact.

Today, PLOS ONE, in collaboration with altmetrics.org is pleased to announce the launch of the PLOS ONE Altmetrics Collection, a body of research that aims to provide a forum for the dissemination of innovative research on these metrics.

The growing field of altmetrics uses online activity to collect fine-grained data, including viewership, discussion, saving, and recommendation along with traditional citation. This allows   researchers, funders, institutions and policy makers to create a higher resolution picture of the reach and impact of academic research and track its effects on diverse audiences. The PLOS ONE Altmetrics Collection gathers an emerging body of research for the further study and use of altmetrics. As an on-going collection, it aims to continually cover a range of subjects including statistical analysis of altmetrics data sources; metric validation, and identification of biases in measurements; validation of models of scientific discovery or recommendation based on altmetrics; qualitative research describing the scholarly use of online tools and environments; empirically-supported theory guiding altmetrics use; and other research relating to scholarly impact in online tools and environments.

The Collection is open to all authors to submit research in these areas. Articles are presented in order of publication date and new articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

To read more about this collection, please visit: PLOS Collections: Altmetrics Collection (2012)