Hacking the PLoS Article-Level Metrics API Server | Gobbledygook

"Article-Level Metrics looks at the usage and reach of an individual article instead of using the Journal Impact Factor as a proxy for the impact of a paper. The PLoS Article-Level Metrics API provides access to some interesting numbers: not only citations, HTML pageviews and PDF downloads, but also social metrics such as number of bookmarks in CiteULike or number of readers in Mendeley. But for the hackathon I was not interested in building a tool that talks to the Article-Metrics API. On Sunday morning I had discovered that the PLoS Article-Level Metrics server software is not only available as Open Source software, but is built with Ruby on Rails, a programming framework that I’m familiar with. So I thought it would be fun to start improving the software by adding metrics on the author level. And by building your own Article-Level Metrics server, you are not limited to papers published in PLoS journals, or to the kinds of metrics provided by PLoS. Wouldn’t it for example be nice to also include download counts for Dryad datasets? ..."