Having a good deal of contact with the Department of Emergency Medicine at my institution and their scholarly and information needs, I took a look at SCImago for the top 10 Emergency Medicine journals with at least 30 published articles in the past three years:
SCImago Emergency Medicine Top Ten Journals (10/31/2012)
Knowing the PLOS ONE publishes research from many disciplines, I decided to see what was published with any of the following terms/phrases: emergency services, emergency medicine, emergency room, or emergency hospital services.
I was honestly not prepared for the result: 799 (click to see the result as of today). 211 of those articles are from 2011, the last complete year we can compare to any of the journals identified in the SCImago list.
Using SCOPUS to find the 10 most-cited 2011 articles from Annals of Emergency Medicine, I counted 132 times-cited in those 10 articles. Taking the 10 most-cited 2011 articles in PLOS ONE on some aspect of emergency services, I counted 116 times-cited in those 10 articles. Not a clear citation advantage for PLOS ONE in this sample, yet each PLOS ONE citation provides article metrics, including number of actual view and downloads, times-cited data, and social networking notice:
Guerriero C, Cairns J, Perel P, Shakur H, Roberts I (2011) Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Administering Tranexamic Acid to Bleeding Trauma Patients Using Evidence from the CRASH-2 Trial. PLoS ONE 6(5): e18987. Metrics captured 10/31/2012.
There is simply nothing like this real-time detailed metrics portrait of usage to lend social and professional credibility, on top of the citing publication evidence. There is already evidence of a significant amount of Emergency Medicine research being published and cited, downloaded, shared, and mentioned in the social networking world and conveniently tracked by article metrics.
