NPG begins offering article-level metrics

Article-level metrics are now available on 20 journals on Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) publishing platform. The move means that Nature.com users can view an article’s citation data, page views, news mentions, blog posts and social shares including Facebook and Twitter.

This enhanced functionality is available on Nature, the Nature research journals and Nature Communications. It is also available on Scientific Reports. Article-level metrics are available on research articles published since 2011 and are openly accessible to everyone.

‘The interest in both traditional metrics and “altmetrics” from the research community is clear, and NPG is pleased to offer this improved functionality and service to our readers and authors. Institutions, funders and those mining data are also beginning to look at this information, for example for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) evaluation in the UK. Some REF panels will look at article citations and consider other measures of tracking research impact,’ commented Kira Anthony, editorial development manager of NPG.

Citation data is pulled from Web of Science, CrossRef and Scopus and is updated daily. The counts for each article link out to a citation list. Page views on nature.com are updated daily. Readers can see total views (HTML+PDF) of the article, and track the cumulative count on a given day using an interactive graph. However, page view data only reflect usage on the nature.com platform and are only for articles published on or after 1 January 2012.

News, blog posts, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit bookmarks data, are provided by Altmetric and updated hourly using Altmetric’s application programming interface (API). Blog and Google+ lists link out to the original posts, and news links out to the original article. To be included, third party news pieces must contain a link to the relevant article on nature.com. A world map shows the number of tweets per country.

NPG's managing director, Steven Inchcoombe explained: ‘This functionality is another step in NPG's ongoing mission to empower scientists, increase transparency and assess importance. Article level metrics, our Linked Data platform, ORCID integration on nature.com and our manuscript submission system, open access options and other developments are all building blocks towards achieving those goals.’