"The significance isn’t primarily about PLoS, it’s about the ability to finally measure impact at the article-level in real-time." - Daniel Mietchen from Bookmarklet

" 1. We can now measure the impact of an individual article in terms of readership. For example, how many downloads, average time spent reading, how often the article is shared. 2. The measurement is in real-time. We no longer have to wait two years or more before seeing how often an article is being cited to determine its worth. 3. We are leveling the playing field for all journals. Through readership statistics, each article can now be rated upon its own merits rather than by the journal it happens to get accepted into for publication. " - Daniel Mietchen

That's all about readership so far (and thus to some extent skewed towards popular topics), not research quality. But still interesting and necessary developments. - Daniel Mietchen

@Daniel: True, there could be a bias towards popular topics. Hopefully, a bit of normalization will help to limit that feedback loop of "popularity breeds popularity." Transparency in the process, rather than a magical black box, should also help to understand any trends. - Jason Hoyt

For what PLoS ONE is up to in this area check out: http://conferences.aepic.it/index... - Peter Binfield

Thanks, Peter - that's a good summary, unfortunately buried in that conference that none of my reference search engines has indexed. Anyway, please take a look at a test implementation of single-item metrics at http://bit.ly/mDL58 which might be helpful when discussing rating standards across sites in relation to the need for transparency that Jason has alluded to. - Daniel Mietchen

Well, to be fair it only went live on that site last week so it may not have been indexed yet. Also, I will be blogging it sometime this week (with the ppt etc). I think transparency is going to be the number one thing needed to make any system work - users need to trust the data and trust their ability to compare metrics across publishers / journals / articles. - Peter Binfield

More on popularity: "Based on theoretical reasoning it has been suggested that the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field." Source: http://bit.ly/RU9RX . - Daniel Mietchen