Nautilus
EMBO reports asks “Is the end in cite?”
In a Correspondence to EMBO reports ( 10, 1186; 2009), Mark Patterson asks how we can avoid Howy Jacobs’s “light-hearted nightmare scenario” of the future of citation-based metrics. Patterson, director of publishing at the Public Library of Science (PLoS), presents his own organization’s article-level metrics, as a better alternative to the journal-level metrics that are currently in most common use as research output measures. He writes: “Article-level data are not without their problems, and so it is important to interpret the data carefully. But, we believe that providing the data in the first place will inspire new ideas about how to assess research.
