Autism Speaks, an autism science and advocacy organisation, has purchased PlumX™ to track the metrics on the research outputs that its funding has helped create. PlumX from Plum™ Analytics, an EBSCO company, will give Autism Speaks powerful and actionable information about the more than $200 million in autism research that it has funded since it was founded.
PlumX is an impact dashboard that provides information on how research output is being utilised, interacted with, and talked about around the world. It delivers a more complete picture of research and answers questions about research impact by gathering "altmetrics" or "alternative metrics" which are metrics around artifacts such as articles, clinical trials, blog posts, grants, books, theses/dissertations, webpages and more. The altmetrics are then categorised into Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media and Citations.
With PlumX, Autism Speaks will be able to gather and analyze metrics, at several levels including: Grant ID, Researcher, Institution, Research Topic, Grant Type and Geography. This will give Autism Speaks powerful and actionable information that can then be used to tell the stories of impact behind its work and give the organisation a better sense of the return on investment of specific funding. Autism Speaks also plans to make the data available so that donors will see the impact of the funds they have donated. Researchers can receive credit for what they have done and newer researchers will gain visibility.
Plum Analytics clams to be the only company synthesizing metrics data for custom analysis for each organisation and for publishers and presenting the metrics in a variety of ways including data visualisations, dashboards, and widgets.
