Plum Analytics

Plum Analytics
Name	Plum Analytics
Type	Private
Industry	Bibliometrics
Founded	2011
Founders	Adam Amara; Andrea Michalek
Headquarters	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Owner	Elsevier (acquired 2017)

Plum Analytics is a bibliometrics company that developed an alternative metrics (altmetrics) aggregator and analytics platform for tracking research impact across diverse outputs. The service compiles attention and usage signals for scholarly works, including articles, datasets, software, and presentations, drawing on online platforms, repositories, and citation indices. It sought to broaden assessment beyond traditional citation-based indicators by incorporating social media, policy documents, patent citations, and usage statistics from digital libraries.

Overview

Plum Analytics positioned itself at the intersection of scholarly communication, research evaluation, and information technology. Its platform ingested identifiers such as DOIs, PubMed IDs, and ORCID iDs to produce indicators linked to outputs housed in repositories like arXiv, PubMed Central, and Zenodo. The company integrated data from commercial services and standards organizations including CrossRef, DataCite, and the Open Researcher and Contributor ID community to normalize metadata. Plum Analytics appealed to stakeholders such as university libraries, research offices at institutions like University of California, funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, and publishers including Taylor & Francis and Wiley seeking more granular evidence of influence across platforms such as Twitter, Mendeley, and Figshare.

Metrics and Methodology

The platform categorized metrics into distinct families to reflect different types of engagement. Typical categories included usage metrics traced from institutional repositories and publisher platforms, captures from reference managers like Mendeley and Zotero, mentions on microblogging services such as Twitter and blogs hosted on platforms like WordPress, and citations in scholarly literature indexed by databases like Scopus and Web of Science. Plum Analytics also reported citations appearing in patent documents filed at offices like the United States Patent and Trademark Office and policy citations in reports from organizations such as the World Health Organization and the European Commission. Methodologically, the service relied on persistent identifiers (e.g., Digital Object Identifier), metadata harvesting protocols including OAI-PMH, and APIs provided by aggregators such as Altmetric-adjacent sources and commercial aggregators. The company documented provenance at the item level, distinguishing between automated harvesting, publisher-supplied usage logs, and third-party APIs to facilitate reproducibility and verification by librarians and metric analysts.

History and Ownership

Founded in 2011 by information entrepreneurs with backgrounds in scholarly communication and data analytics, the company emerged during a period of increasing interest in altmetrics driven by initiatives like the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and the founding of organizations such as the Altmetrics Manifesto community. Early collaborations connected the firm with institutions experimenting with institutional repositories and research information systems (CRIS) such as PURE and Symplectic Elements. In 2017 Plum Analytics was acquired by Elsevier, a global publisher and analytics company, integrating its metrics into Elsevier products and linking with databases including Scopus and the ScienceDirect platform. Post-acquisition, the technology underpinned services marketed to libraries and research administrators associated with consortia such as Association of Research Libraries members and research funders in networks like the European University Association.

Products and Services

Plum Analytics offered a suite of dashboards and APIs that surfaced altmetric indicators at item, author, departmental, and institutional levels. Institutional products connected with research information management systems such as Pure and identity systems like ORCID to enable report generation for tenure committees at universities like Harvard University and grant reporting to agencies including the National Science Foundation. The company packaged data feeds for bibliometric analysis in environments used by metricians, including integrations with visualization tools from vendors like Tableau and open-source platforms such as R and Python libraries for scientometric research. Additional services included training for librarians from associations like the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and consultancy for universities participating in global rankings managed by organizations like Times Higher Education.

Reception and Impact

Reception among librarians, publishers, and research evaluators was mixed but influential. Supporters—including practitioners at repository networks such as DSpace and advocacy groups like SPARC—argued that the taxonomy of metrics helped surface diverse forms of scholarly influence, benefiting creators of datasets and software hosted on platforms like GitHub. Critics among scientometricians and editorial boards of journals such as Nature and PLOS cautioned against overreliance on alternative indicators without domain-specific context, echoing concerns from initiatives like the Declaration on Research Assessment regarding metric misuse. Empirical studies by researchers affiliated with institutions like Leiden University and University of Oxford used Plum Analytics data to analyze attention patterns across disciplines, influencing conversations at conferences such as the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics.

Privacy and Criticism

Privacy and methodological criticisms focused on provenance transparency, potential double-counting of interactions across aggregated sources, and the implications of commercial ownership for data openness. Privacy advocates and librarians from consortia including Canadian Association of Research Libraries raised questions about the harvesting of user-level engagement from platforms such as Twitter and academic social networks like ResearchGate without clear consent frameworks. Critics in the bibliometrics community, affiliated with centers like the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden and research groups at MIT, highlighted challenges in interpreting social media mentions as impact and emphasized the need for robust normalization when comparing across fields and time. Elsevier’s acquisition prompted debate about consolidation in scholarly infrastructure among stakeholders including funders represented by the Wellcome Trust and national bodies like Research Councils UK.

Category:Bibliometrics