PlumX Metrics

PlumX Metrics
Name	PlumX Metrics
Type	Altmetrics / Research impact analytics
Owner	Elsevier
Launched	2012
Country	United States

PlumX Metrics PlumX Metrics is a research impact analytics service providing article-level attention and engagement data to institutions, publishers, and researchers. The platform aggregates usage, captures, mentions, social media, and citation-related indicators to complement citation databases for assessment at Harvard University, University of Oxford, Stanford University, and National Institutes of Health. It is used alongside resources such as Scopus, Web of Science, CrossRef, ORCID to inform library services, promotion and tenure reviews, and grant reporting.

Overview

PlumX Metrics classifies engagement into five main categories—usage, captures, mentions, social media, and citations—and presents dashboards for stakeholders at Elsevier, Michigan State University, Cornell University, University of Toronto, and Max Planck Society. The service integrates identifiers from Digital Object Identifier, PubMed, arXiv, Zenodo, and Figshare to link research outputs with altmetric evidence. Institutions use PlumX outputs in parallel with Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic and institutional repositories to monitor attention to books, conference proceedings, datasets, and software.

History and Development

Developed by Plum Analytics, founded by a team with experience at University of Nebraska–Lincoln and collaborations with National Science Foundation, Plum Analytics launched the PlumX product in 2012 and was acquired by Elsevier in 2017. The acquisition intensified integration with products such as Mendeley, ScienceDirect, and Scopus and fostered partnerships with consortia including Research Councils UK and the European Research Council. Early adopters like University of California campuses and Imperial College London contributed to iterative features involving dashboards, API access, and institutional reporting.

Metrics and Indicators

PlumX Metrics presents indicators grouped into five categories—usage (views, downloads), captures (bookmarks, Mendeley saves), mentions (news, blog posts), social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit), and citations (policy citations, scholarly references). It records evidence from sources such as PubMed Central, Wiley Online Library, Springer Nature, PLOS, and Taylor & Francis and maps these to outputs with DOI or ISBN identifiers. The system reports altmetrics for diverse outputs including monographs cited in British Library holdings, datasets deposited in Dryad, and software archived at GitHub.

Data Sources and Collection Methods

Data ingestion relies on APIs, web scraping, and partnerships with providers like Mendeley, Twitter, Facebook, F1000Research, and Altmetric.com feed services. PlumX links authors using ORCID iDs and matches documents via CrossRef metadata, indexing records from aggregators such as ProQuest and EBSCO. For grey literature, the platform harvests content from institutional repositories at Columbia University, University of Melbourne, and National Library of Medicine as well as preprint servers like bioRxiv and medRxiv.

Platform Features and Integration

Features include customizable dashboards, exportable reports, API endpoints, and integration into discovery platforms like Elsevier Fingerprint Engine and library systems such as Ex Libris Alma. PlumX supports linking to author profiles on ResearchGate, institutional profiles at ORCID, and integrates with reporting workflows used by Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and national assessment exercises like Research Excellence Framework. Visualization tools display temporal trends, geographic distributions, and source breakdowns for stakeholders including libraries, departments, and research offices.

Adoption and Use in Research Evaluation

Universities including Yale University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, University College London, and national labs such as Los Alamos National Laboratory use PlumX Metrics to supplement tenure dossiers, grant applications to agencies like National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, and institutional benchmarking in collaboration with research offices. Funders and publishers integrate PlumX indicators with citation indices from Scopus and Web of Science during program evaluations and editorial decisions at journals published by Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier imprints.

Criticism and Limitations

Critics from academic communities including commentators at Nature, Science (journal), and Times Higher Education highlight concerns about data opacity, susceptibility to gaming via automated bots on platforms like Twitter and Reddit, and uneven coverage across disciplines such as humanities collections at British Library and STEM outputs at CERN. Questions persist regarding comparability with metrics from Altmetric.com, reproducibility of counts, and reliance on proprietary datasets tied to Elsevier commercial interests. The heterogeneity of sources—ranging from Mendeley saves to policy mentions in documents by World Health Organization—raises challenges for standardization and for use in formal evaluation frameworks at bodies like European Commission.

Category:Altmetrics