Re: Peering into PLoS One comment stats

mndoci — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:06:35 -0000

Peter

Your understanding of the axes of the graphs and what data they represent is correct. Longer response later this evening :)

Re: Peering into PLoS One comment stats

Peter Binfield — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:40:57 -0000

Deepak,

Thanks for the analysis. I have a couple of clarifications on your second and third graphs which may help people interpret what they are seeing there.

These two graphs are effectively showing the same data (but with differences in the Y axis), but you may want to confirm my understanding below.

First some background:

People can leave Notes on an article (literally highlighting an area of text and making a note on it); they can leave general Comments (discursive text about the entire article); or they can make a Rating (and when making a Rating they also have the chance to leave a text comment, and some people have done this).

In addition, PLoS itself sometimes leaves Comments/Notes (e.g. to post reviewer comments, or to make corrections) therefore, to get a picture of real user activity, we should remove PLoS originated comments from any counts (which both of your graphs have done).

Since launch, we have numbered our articles sequentially from #1 to #2782 (the highest number in the data set we provided - July 23rd 2008).

Given the above, I believe that your 2nd graph plots:

(number of Comments+Notes+Ratings that included a text comment EXCLUDING any such comments left by PLoS itself) vs (the actual article numbers)

You make the point that article number (the x axis) is a proxy for time . It is a proxy for time, of course, but in fact the number of articles we have published has steadily increased each month as per the data I paste below.

Therefore if the graph were charted against actual time (rather than article number) you would see a different pattern (basically the right hand side of the graph would be rising).

This is effectively what your third graph is showing, except the Y axis is slightly differently defined from the prior graph. Your X axis is 'month' (Jan 2007 through to July 2008) and the Y axis is the number of Comments and Notes (EXCLUDING any text comments left within a Rating event , and EXCLUDING any Comments left by PLoS itself).

The data for number of articles published per month is as follows (note that July data is not a full month, as the data supplied only went through Jul 23rd):

Month # of articles published
200612 138
200701 48
200702 79
200703 73
200704 60
200705 93
200706 87
200707 84
200708 153
200709 146
200710 153
200711 136
200712 118
200801 153
200802 177
200803 167
200804 205
200805 223
200806 234
200807 246

Also, the fact that July 2008 was not a full month of output would explain why the final data point in your third graph looks low

Pete Binfield (Managing Editor of PLoS ONE)

bbgm - the discussion - Latest Comments in Peering into PLoS One comment stats

Re: Peering into PLoS One comment stats

Re: Peering into PLoS One comment stats