Mickey Schafer's Profile

trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's
Island, they just assume that media
includes consuming, producing and sharing.

meat for those of us who are in the trenches trying to make things happen.

If choosing which articles to read on the basis of journal-level metrics is not effective, then we need a measure of importance that tells us about the article. It makes sense that when choosing which of a set of articles to read, we should turn to “article-level metrics,” yet in practice data on individual articles are rarely considered, let alone seriously measured.

citation-based metrics are not the answer

And if there is no reward for quality contribution then people will struggle to justify the time involved in generating high quality comments

for example, how many times a paper has been viewed or downloaded, how many unique users have shown an interest, or how long they lingered

some significant advantages

A significant question is why would they share that valuable information with the rest of the world?

to a new set of “editors” who curate published papers in a different, but possibly just as useful way.

a tool that works within the workflow that researchers are already using can more easily capture and aggregate useful information

Different users will need different information and it will take time before any metric proves useful.

to build and use better filters.