Trackbacks are here!

Yesterday, PLoS ONE moved to the newest version of the TOPAZ platform. Rich Cave explains all the improvements that this move entails, including the citation download for articles, but one new feature that should really be exciting to bloggers are Trackbacks.

From now on, if you link to a PLoS ONE article in your post, that article will display a link back to your blog post (go to an article and look at the right side-bar, nested between the Discussions and Ratings). Thus, in addition to the conversation already going on in the commentary attached to the article itself, the readers will be able to access the responses from the blogosphere as well. And that should also bring additional traffic to the bloggers.

We have been testing the feature over the past 24 hours or so, but we need your input in order to refine and improve the Trackbacks feature.

First, for the time being, the link you use in your post has to be in the format of the full URL of the full text (i.e., not the shorter, DOI-only compression), so this is how it should look like (replace 0000000 with the actual number of the article):

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000000

Unfortunately, for the time being (and we are working on it), this shorter form of the URL will not work:

http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0000000

Likewise, links to other parts of the site, e.g., to the PDF of the article, will not generate trackbacks.

So far, it appears that Trackbacks are working automatically on Drupal and MoveableType, i.e., there is no need for manual trackbacks.

In Wordpress.com, it is necessary to type the trackback URL into the appropriate field in your posting form. The trackback URL is in this form:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000000/trackback

At this moment, it appears that links from Blogger/Blogspot blogs do not generate Trackbacks, but we are working on it. Test it anyway and let us know if there is a "trick" we missed so far.

Also, please let us know how it works on other platforms (e.g., Typepad, RadioUserland, Blogsome, LiveJournal, etc.)

I am not 100% sure (so tell me if I am wrong), but links posted "under the fold" will also not generate a trackback.

Also, and this may differ between platforms, I am not sure that republishing a blog (or an individual post) will trigger trackbacks from links made before yesterday. Give it a test run and let me know, please.

You can give us feedback in the comments here, or by e-mail (Bora@plos.org), or by contacting the Webmaster on the PLoS ONE site.