Lagotto 4.3 released 20 Jul 2015

Lagotto 4.3 was released on July 20, 2015 with the following changes:

Lagotto 4.2.1 released 13 Jul 2015

Lagotto 4.2.1 was released on July 13, 2015 with the following changes:

Lagotto 4.2 released 13 Jul 2015

Lagotto 4.2 was released on July 13, 2015 with the following changes:

Lagotto 4.1.1 released 06 Jul 2015

Lagotto 4.1.1 was released on July 6, 2015 with the following fixes:

Lagotto 4.1 released 17 Jun 2015

Lagotto 4.1 was released on June 17, 2015 with the following changes:

Lagotto 4.0 released 05 May 2015

Lagotto 4.0 was released on May 5, 2015 with the following changes:

The Mystery of the Missing ALM 07 Mar 2014

What is ten years old and has 1.2 billion interactions a day?

One Step Closer to Article-Level Metrics openly available for all Scholarly Content 24 Feb 2014

Since PLOS embarked on the Article-Level Metrics (ALM) work in 2009, we have always imagined a future in which ALMs would be freely available regardless of publisher. Metrics would be compiled to facilitate comparisons between articles and add even greater value to the scholarly community.

Research findings: going deeper than the article 05 Dec 2013

We have recently released two new Article-Level Metrics (ALM) data sources: Europe PMC Database Citations and DataCite. The data from both sources are displayed on the metrics tab of PLOS articles, are available through the PLOS ALM API, and are available to all users of the open source ALM application. These new sources are both related to research data, and they represent a new breed of metrics in our ALM suite.

Evaluating Impact: What’s your number? 06 Nov 2013

What’s your number? This Saturday, we (MF) will be addressing this very question at the SpotOn London conference with Marie Boran, David Colquhoun, Jean Liu and Stephen Curry. In advance of the discussion on the role of altmetrics in evaluating scientific research, we offer our views from a historical perspective.

Rising Tides & the Open Horizon for ALM 24 Oct 2013

With support from the Sloan Foundation, PLOS hosted the second annual ALM workshop on Oct 10-12, 2013. Presentation slides and links to post-workshop write-ups from the community have been linked on Lanyrd. Over 80 participants registered for the 26 “black diamond” presentations in the first two days of the program. And 20 people participated in the Data Challenge on the closing day. We had representation from a wide spectrum of the scholarly research ecosystem – researchers, publishers, academic institutions, funders, technology providers, etc.

Announcing the release of ALM 2.9 – now with more errors 09 Oct 2013

We have released the latest version of the open source Article-Level Metrics application that PLOS is using to track how many times each article has been viewed, saved, discussed, recommended, and cited. Since it is an open source application, everyone can install this software and collect metrics for a different set of articles.

Article-Level Metrics – Learning to Walk, Run & Do Algebra 05 Sep 2013

Article-Level Metrics (ALM) may have outgrown the infant stage, but the “terrible two’s and three’s” have now arrived when it must learn to walk, run, and… do algebra.

Eat your own dogfood: lessons learned from building an API 22 Aug 2013

The PLOS Article-Level Metrics application is open source software that collects a variety of metrics about scholarly articles. The application talks to a number of APIs, and in return provides these metrics via an API. Work on this application therefore involves a lot of work on APIs, and some of the lessons I learned are summarized below, including changes we made in the latest ALM 2.8 release. Most of the things I mention are fairly obvious, but some of them could be starting points for a discussion. Good APIs are important for scholarly content, as we increasingly use computers to extract relevant information out of papers – see for example the cool projects done at the hack4ac event last month, including the one on PLOS author contributions that I participated in.

Apples & Oranges – they don’t compare 08 Aug 2013

One of the challenges of introducing new metrics to measure the scholarly impact of journal articles is that we want these metrics to be consistent and reproducible. This task ranges from easy (single authoritative source), hard (mediated by middlemen), and very hard (multiple sources).  Twitter falls in the last group – there is no single, defined set of tweets about a paper as Twitter itself doesn’t make old tweets available. But there are multiple ways to get around the problem using a plethora of online services (e.g., multiple Twitter APIs, Topsy, private, in-house applications, etc.). The second category is common amongst ALM providers, including PLOS: we collect citations, bookmarks, etc. from CrossRef, Web of Science, Mendeley, etc. and then display these numbers next to our journal articles.

Let’s stop wandering the altmetrics grocery store… 01 Aug 2013

As a research community, we have long gone hungry for ways to assess research. With journal-based evaluation, we were feeding off of flies – perfect for a frog but not enough for a researcher. Today, we have entered into the golden era of the Altmetrics Grocery Store, filled with a diversity of fresh produce.