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Binary Battle Finalists Announced

Update: Vote! We’ve opened up a poll for you to voice your opinion on who should win the Binary Battle. We’ll take the aggregate total decided by the public and add that to the judges’ votes to determine the overall winner and runner-up. You’ll have until 11:59 PM Pacific time on Monday, November 28th, 2011 to get your vote in.

Over the past six weeks, PLoS and our friends at Mendeley have been hard at work reviewing all the fantastic apps submitted to the PLoS/Mendeley Binary Battle. We’re pleased to announce the finalists, honorable mentions, and our PLoS Picks. Stay tuned for our announcement of the winners on November 30, 2011!

Finalists (in alphabetical order)

Honorable Mentions

PLoS Picks

Some of our favorite apps featuring the PLoS APIs:

  • PLoS Impact Explorer: Developed by Euan Adie, Product Manager at the Macmillan-funded startup, Digital Science, the PLoS Impact Explorer app is an extension of Adie’s Altmetric service, which tracks and scores academic output (scientific articles and datasets) based on the mentions it has received in the press, on reference manager websites, on social media websites, and in literature reviews. This app features a clean, intuitive interface and nicely integrates the PLoS Search API, Mendeley reader counts, and Altmetric’s scores for academic output.
  • ScienceCard: PLoS Blogger, Martin Fenner, has created a deceptively simple and very useful app that collects and cleanly displays altmetric and citation information for authors’ published articles (including information pulled from the PLoS ALM API). Registering for ScienceCard is a breeze—in five minutes, you can create an easy, automatically-updated webpage to which can link, use as a reference when collecting altmetric information on your publications, or integrate into your own webpage or webservice using the ScienceCard API. The only downside to this app is that two of the services it incorporates—Altmetric and CrossRef—don’t allow you to click-through to find out more about the numbers displayed on your ScienceCard.
  • Total-Impact: Total-Impact fulfills an unmet need for how researchers can collect and display a variety of altmetrics in one place. The app’s contributors (including PLoS authors Heather Piwowar and Egon Willighagen, plus Jason Priem, Cristhian Daniel Parra Trepowski, Paul Groth, Mark Hahnel, and Dario Taraborelli) admit that Total-Impact is a work in progress, as they are managing from 1-20+ different metrics (i.e., citations, downloads, Mendeley readers, unique IP views, etc) for a wide range of academic output (i.e., peer reviewed articles, Slideshare decks, Dryad datasets, etc). Major kudos to the Total-Impact team for taking on this challenging project, and for employing the PLoS ALM API so well!

What next?

The list of finalists will now be reviewed by a panel of influential judges from technology, media and science. Stay tuned for our announcement of the Binary Battle winners on November 30, 2011!

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