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Help Using This Site

Need help using this site? Here are some answers to common support questions.

Navigation of PLOS Content

We have designed the site to enhance access to and assessment of article content and data as quickly as possible.

Navigate the corpus

Content discovery can be laborious without robust tools to create a refined list of relevant articles customized for your changing needs. We provide three components to assist you in this process: search filters, abstract and figure previews, and custom saved search.

Search filters

We offer search filters for users to drill down into preliminary results and glean a more precise selection. On the results page, you can create filters based on a set of facets and sub-facets to further refine the search. Users can toggle back and forth between results by adding and clearing filters. We currently offer the following filters:

Journals

  • PLOS ONE
  • PLOS Biology
  • PLOS Medicine
  • PLOS Pathogens
  • PLOS Computational Biology
  • PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases
  • PLOS Hub for Clinical Trials
  • PLOS Collections

Subject Areas

  • Biology and life sciences
  • Medicine and health sciences
  • Physical sciences
  • Research and analysis methods
  • [additional taxonomic terms based on search]

Authors

  • [author listing based on search]

Where my keywords appear

  • Title
  • Abstract
  • Introduction
  • Body
  • Materials and Methods
  • Results and Discussion
  • Conclusions
  • Supporting Information
  • References

Article Type

  • Research Article
  • Review
  • Overview

Abstract and figure previews

While the default view of search results is in list form, they can also be displayed as "figures." With this setting, each article tile showcases a representative image, along with general information such as title, date published, author listing, etc. Without leaving their search results, users can immediately preview the article by screening its abstract and complete set of figures or directly download the PDF.

Custom saved search

Once you have created a search on exact fields of interest, stay up-to-date with automatic notifications of the latest content that matches your request: email and RSS feed. Users can directly subscribe to that particular RSS feed. Or they can log in and save the search for email notifications.

Navigate the article

We designed the layout and functionality of our articles to help users quickly navigate the article across each of its components.

We offer at-a-glance Metrics Signposts at the top of every article to further support content discovery. These numbers offer an up-to-date glimpse of the article’s reach since publication. This data can inform your browsing experience and enable swift navigation based on the impact profile of interest. We display a varied selection of metrics versatile to serve a variety of browsing modes, whether you are interested in a highly cited paper, highly shared paper, etc.

Metrics Signposts are made up of a sub-set of ALM data. For a more comprehensive view of article reach and impact, please use the full ALM suite of impact indicators displayed on the article Metrics tab.

We display additional content for each article across article tabs, making it easy to see and use. Users can navigate to the article's companion information:

As you scroll down the article page, the article navigation links to the left of the main article text float down the screen, and indicate which section of the article you’re currently viewing. Clicking these links will jump you directly to the relevant article section.

Metrics signposts

We offer at-a-glance Metrics Signposts at the top of every article to further support content discovery. These numbers offer an up-to-date glimpse of the article’s reach since publication. This data can inform your browsing experience and enable swift navigation based on the impact profile of interest. We display a varied selection of metrics versatile to serve a variety of browsing modes, whether you are interested in a highly cited paper, highly shared paper, etc.

  • Views: the sum of PLOS and PubMed Central pageviews and downloads
  • Citations: the paper's citation count computed by Scopus
  • Academic Bookmarks: the total Mendeley, CiteULike, and Connotea bookmarks
  • Social Shares: the sum of Facebook and Twitter activity

Enriched article information across tabs

We display additional content for each article across article tabs, making it easy to see and use. Users can navigate to the article's companion information:

  • About the Authors
  • Metrics
  • Comments
  • Related Comment

Persistent article navigation links

As you scroll down the article page, the article navigation links to the left of the main article text float down the screen, and indicate which section of the article you’re currently viewing. Clicking these links will jump you directly to the relevant article section.

Share This Article

The “bookmarklet” icons in the right-hand column of every article allow users to save and share links to articles via a number of popular “social bookmarking” services such as Reddit, Google+, Stumble Upon, Facebook, and CiteULike.

PLOS Journals Account

You may read PLOS journals without creating an account. However, an account is required to receive journal email alerts and to comment on articles. Accounts are free.

Create Account

On the Create account page, fill in the brief form and click “Create Account.” A confirmation will be sent to your email address with the title “Please verify your PLOS registration.” Use the URL in that email to complete your registration.

Login

“Sign in” and “Create account” links are available near the top right corner of every journal page.

The first time you log in, you are required to create a profile with basic information, with which you will be identified whenever you rate or comment on an article. As part of your profile, you must choose a username. Your username is attached to all commentary that you make on PLOS Web sites. This means that all your commentary is credited and attributed to you. You cannot change your username. It is possible to get a new username by registering for a whole new account, but anything you have done on your original account will not transfer to the new account with the new username.

Lost Password

If you have forgotten your password, go to the Forgot password page, enter your email address, and click “Send”. An email will be sent to the email address you use to log in to your PLOS user account.

Journal Email Alerts

Sign up for a PLOS journal email alert in your journal account. If you are creating a new account, a confirmation will be sent to your email address with the title “Please verify your PLOS registration.” Use the URL in that email to complete your registration.

To subscribe/unsubscribe from a PLOS journal email alert:

  1. Login to your PLOS Journal account. Enter your PLOS login email address and Password. Click “Sign In.”
  2. Check/uncheck the boxes on the “Journal Alerts” tab to subscribe/unsubscribe from a specific mailing list.”

To update your email address to which PLOS journal email alerts are sent:

  1. Login to your PLOS Journal account. Enter your PLOS login email address and Password. Click “Sign In.”
  2. In your profile, click the “Email” tab.
  3. Enter the new email address which you wish to use to receive alerts and click “Change email address.”

Linking your ORCID Account

PLOS endorses ORCID and requires that all corresponding authors provide an ORCID iD when submitting a manuscript. We encourage coauthors to register and use their ORCID as well.

We publish the corresponding author's ORCID iD as well as any ORCIDs provided by coauthors if the manuscript is accepted. We participate in the auto-update feature implemented by Crossref such that when a paper is published, the authors’ ORCIDs are deposited and subsequently used to update each author’s ORCID record. Read more about ORCID.

Article-Level Metrics

The “Metrics” tab on each article provides information on online article usage, citations to the article, and other indicators of impact. The regularly updated data fall into the following categories:

  • citations
  • article usage
  • media and blog coverage about the article
  • social tools for reference management as well as research recommendation and evaluation
  • PLOS reader evaluation

These are described in full on the journal ALM page.

Article Usage

Online “Article Usage” data, as recorded at PLOS sites, are available for all PLOS journals for all articles published from June 17, 2005 to present. The understanding of these data is not straightforward, and so we have provided detailed (technical) information and summary data tables. Newly published articles do not accumulate usage data instantaneously but require approximately 48 hours before data are shown.

PubMed Central (PMC) usage data for each article was introduced in January of 2010, and PLOS started displaying this data from Jan 2012. PMC counts the number of page views and PDF downloads of the article on their site. PMC sends their usage data to us once a month. As a result, articles may experience a lag with the display of PMC data (up to a month's time). The total article usage data is an aggregate of PLOS and PMC usage, combined.

These sources have their own limitations and in addition, results may overlap between sources. Read more detailed information about article usage data.

Article Citations

Citations to the article are gathered from several sources including PubMed Central, Scopus, ISI Web of Science, and CrossRef.

These sources have their own limitations and in addition, results may overlap between sources. Read more detailed information about article citation metrics.

Other indicators of the impact of the article include:

  • Social tools for reference management, recommendation, and evaluation: Twitter, Facebook, Mendeley, CiteULike, and Connotea
  • Blog coverage: ResearchBlogging and Nature Blogs
  • Non-scholarly references: Wikipedia
  • PLOS reader evaluation: Comments/Notes/Star ratings on PLOS site

More information about each of these indicators and their limitations can be found on our Article-Level Metrics Information page.

Please note that, excluding PLOS article usage and PLOS reader evaluation, the data reported is automatically generated via information supplied by each service. PLOS is not responsible (nor able to correct) any errors which originate with the third party concerned.

Subject Areas

The “Subject Areas” panel on each article page displays a set of terms selected for that article based on its content. The Subject Areas belong to a thesaurus of over 10,000 terms initially built for us over the course of 2012 by Access Innovations, taking into account the controlled vocabulary of classification terms that had been in use in PLOS Editorial Manager. The entire corpus of PLOS articles was analysed to ensure that the thesaurus covers the research domain comprehensively.

Specific terms are associated with articles by Machine Aided Indexing (MAI) which identifies text strings in the articles and matches them to Subject Area terms from the thesaurus. The output ranks the matches in order of frequency of hits within the text of the article and the top eight terms are selected for display. 

The MAI process uses a Rulebase to guide Subject Area selection. Whereas identifying a phrase such as “Retinitis pigmentosa” is relatively straightforward for software, the issue is more complex for a word such as “Sodium” where the relevant Subject Area might be “Voltage-gated sodium channels”, any of several sodium compounds or even just “Sodium” the element. The rule for terms such as “Sodium” are therefore compound and include conditional statements to disambiguate these different contexts. While the vast majority of terms are effectively indexed there remain ambiguities for some terms and part of our work is to continue to identify these cases and modify the Rulebase accordingly.

The Subject Area terms are related to each other with a system of broader/narrower term relationships. The thesaurus structure is a polyhierarchy, so for example the Subject Area “White blood cells” has two broader terms “Blood cells” and “Immune cells”. At its deepest the hierarchy is ten tiers deep, with all terms tracking back to one or more of the top tier Subject Areas, such as “Biology and life sciences” or “Social sciences.”

The Subject Area terms can be used to filter PLOS content via the Subject-specific option in Advanced Search. The MAI Rulebase accommodates synonyms, so a Subject-specific Search for “Highly active antiretroviral therapy” will retrieve articles based on MAI matches to “HAART” (a known synonym) as well as “Highly active antiretroviral therapy” in one step. Additionally, because we select the most frequently MAI-indexed Subject Areas for each article the Search returns articles where the Subject Area in question ranks highly enough to be included in the top eight MAI-retrieved terms, so is of relatively high significance, whereas a query term in an “All fields” search will return every article that contains even a single match to the query term.

The hierarchical nature of the thesaurus also enhances article retrieval in Search. Not only does Search retrieve all articles specifically indexed by MAI with the query Subject Area term in question, but it also retrieves all articles specifically indexed with any Subject Area term that sits deeper into the hierarchy than the query Subject Area term, but on the same broader/narrower term path. Thus, in the “White blood cells” example, queries for either “Blood cells” or “Immune cells” will return all articles indexed with “White blood cells”.

The Subject Area terms on all article pages are hyperlinked, and following the link returns a listing of all articles to which that Subject Area term applies. Subject Area terms can also be used as the basis for Saved Searches, RSS feeds, and PLOS ONE customized Journal Alerts. The web page header on PLOS ONE includes a “Browse” function which provides click-down exploration of the PLOS thesaurus hierarchy​, with destination Subject Area landing pages that display associated articles.

Each PLOS publication can be downloaded in PDF, Citation, or XML format. The XML download includes the eight specific Subject Area terms as they are listed in the Subject Area panel on the article web page. Additionally, broader terms from all the hierarchical paths leading to each of the eight specifically-identified Subject Area are included in the XML.

The content of the PLOS thesaurus and the Rulebase that governs the application of Subject Areas to the articles is constantly under review. We update the thesaurus behind the PLOS sites several times each year. Files corresponding to the current version (as well as previous versions) can be downloaded here.

 

Related Content

The “Related Content” tab on each article provides links (and information) to additional content which may be related to this article.

The tab provides links to:

  • Related PLOS Articles: More articles by the authors.
  • Subject Areas: The Subject Areas provide access to articles that share the same assigned terms.
  • Media Coverage: Links to News, Blogs and Related Resources

Related Blog Posts

Provides links to blog posts citing each PLOS article via a number of blog aggregation services: ResearchBlogging and Nature Blogs.* A link is also provided to blog posts that have linked to the article via a trackback.

*Please note that the above information is automatically generated via information supplied by each service. PLOS is not responsible (nor able to correct) any errors which originate with the third party concerned.

Article Feeds

Want to keep abreast of all PLOS content without having to regularly visit each site? RSS will allow you to do just that.

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a regularly published collection of headlines and summaries from an original source (e.g., a PLOS journal). Readers can subscribe to their favorite RSS feeds to have the latest news and content updates delivered right to their desktop. To do so, you will need an RSS feed reader. See the section below on reading RSS feeds for more information.

Web site creators can distribute RSS feeds of their published content and can also retrieve and display feeds from other sources on their own Web site. See the section below on displaying PLOS RSS feeds for more information.

What RSS feeds does PLOS provide?

PLOS provides the following RSS feeds which are updated as new articles are published. To create RSS feeds based on search results, click the “RSS” icon on any search results page.

 

How can I read RSS feeds?

There are many free and commercial RSS readers you can use to subscribe to and read RSS feeds. There are RSS-enabled Web browsers, e.g., Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari (Mac). There are Web-based readers, e.g., Bloglines. There are also stand-alone readers, e.g., AmphetaDesk and Feedreader (Windows). You can find RSS readers by searching the Internet for “RSS Reader” or “RSS News Aggregator.”

Please note that PLOS does not endorse any particular RSS reader products.

Displaying PLOS RSS feeds

PLOS RSS feeds are provided free of charge. We encourage you to display our feeds on your Web site. We only ask that you cite the journal title in connection with your use of the feeds. If you provide this attribution with a graphic, please use the logo that we have included in the feed itself.
If you maintain your own Web site, there are a number of ways you can retrieve and display RSS feeds from other sources on your Web site, including JavaScript, PHP, ASP, Perl, and commercial applications like FeedrollPro. Please note that PLOS does not endorse any particular RSS display products.

XML Content

The XML for an individual article can be downloaded directly from that article's Web page using the “XML” link in the download pulldown menu in the right-hand column. 

Programmatic Access to Articles​

PLOS articles can be accessed programmatically through our API, via PubMed Central, or using Europe PMC’s RESTful Web Service and SOAP Web Service. Detailed information about our Search API, including examples, is available at http://api.plos.org/solr/faq/. If you have any questions or require assistance with our API, please contact webmaster@plos.org.

Recommended Web Browsers

This site supports modern web browsers with JavaScript enabled.

Viewing Special Characters and Symbols

We are aware of problems with the display of some special characters and symbols within the articles on some browsers. To ensure you are seeing all special characters and symbols correctly, please look at the PDF version of the article.

Printing PDFs

If you have difficulty printing PDFs, please try updating the drivers on your printer. Printer driver updates are typically available from the printer manufacturer's Web site.

Here are links to several printer manufacturers' download web sites:

If updating your printer drivers does not resolve the problem, please contact webmaster@plos.org with detailed information, including your Web browser software (e.g., Internet Explorer 6.0), version of Adobe Acrobat Reader (or other PDF reader), computer operating system (e.g., Windows XP), and the URLs of the PDFs you are trying to print.

Viewing and Using Multimedia Files

If your Web browser does not already have a plug-in to play videos and use Flash, Shockwave, and SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics) files, there are free players and viewers available for download. We list just a few popular programs below.

File Type Free Players
MOV, MPG, or AVI Windows Media Player (for Windows and Mac); QuickTime (for Mac and Windows); and Totem (for Linux)
SWF Macromedia Flash Player (for Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris)
DCR Macromedia Shockwave Player (for Windows and Mac)
SVG

Download the Adobe SVG Viewer (for Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris) installer program. You must run the installer program to install the plug-in, and for some Web browsers, including Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera, you must take additional steps to complete the installation. For more help, read Adobe's installation instructions and be sure to test your SVG plug-in. Opera users should read how to get Adobe SVG Viewer to work with Opera.

You may right-click or control-click on an SVG figure to save the file to your desktop.

Free Readers/Viewers

Free software is available for viewing Adobe Acrobat PDF, Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files. Download sites for a few popular free programs are listed below.

Document Type Free Readers/Viewers
PDF Adobe Acrobat Reader (cross-platform) 
Xpdf (for X Window System under UNIX, VMS, and OS/2)
DOC Microsoft Word 97/2000 Viewer (for Windows)
XLS Microsoft Excel 97/2000 Viewer (for Windows)
PPT Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 Viewer (for Windows) and PowerPoint Viewer 97/2000/2002 (for Windows) and PowerPoint 98 Viewer (for Mac OS)
All of the above OpenOffice.org offers a free cross-platform software suite for word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing, and database design. Download for Windows/Linux/Solaris, Mac OS X, and Linux PPC.