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Information Standards Quarterly


ISSN: 1041-0031

Summer 2013, v.25, no.2

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Article Title: Consuming Article-Level Metrics: Observations and Lessons
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Author(s): Scott Chamberlain
doi: 10.3789/isqv25no2.2013.02
Citation: Chamberlain, Scott. Consuming Article-Level Metrics: Observations and Lessons. Information Standards Quarterly, Summer 2013, 25(2): 4-13.
Abstract: The Journal Impact Factor (JIF; owned and published by Thomson Reuters) is a summation of the impact of all articles in a journal based on citations. The JIF has significant flaws, including being subject to gaming[4] and not being reproducible. An important critique of the JIF is that it doesn’t measure the impact of individual articles—clearly not all articles in a journal are of the same caliber. Article-level metrics measure the impact of individual articles, including usage (e.g., pageviews, downloads), citations, and social metrics (or altmetrics, e.g., Twitter, Facebook). In this paper the author discuss article-level metrics from the perspective of developing and using scripting interfaces for article-level metrics and compares the data available from the four largest article-level metrics providers: PLOS, ImpactStory, Altmetric, and Plum Analytics.
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