Assessing research impact at the article level. The impact of academic research has long been measured using citations, often with the Journal Impact Factor being used to assess individual publications within it.
However, the Impact Factor is a journal level – not an article level – metric and, as academic publishing and the surrounding discussion moves increasingly onto the web, novel opportunities to track and assess the impact of individual scientific publications have emerged. These web-based approaches are starting to offer an article-level perspective of the way research is disseminated, discussed and integrated across the web. The hope is that a broader set of metrics to complement citations will eventually give a more comprehensive view of article impact, and help to make the most relevant and important publications discoverable to individuals, based on their interests.
The perspective of Genome Biology/BioMed Central. BMC Bioinformatics. Section Editors Adam Godzik, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and UCSD Lawrence Hunter, University of Colorado Denver Igor Jurisica, Ontario Cancer Institute Alexey Nesvizhskii, University of Michigan Adam Olshen, University of California, San Francisco Hanchuan Peng, Allen Institute for Brain Science Graziano Pesole, University of Bari Mihai Pop, University of Maryland Executive Editor Irene Pala, BioMed Central Editorial Board | Editorial Team | Instructions for authors | FAQ.
BMC Chemical Biology.