Plum™ Analytics, an EBSCO company, has introduced the PlumX Suite to ensure that the exact needs of the people and organisations that interact with research are met. The set of five products from Plum Analytics includes specific offerings that categorise and analyse research metrics for those that fund, perform, support or publish research.
Telling the story of research is becoming an increasingly important part of understanding the impact of that research. Traditionally, citation counts have been used to classify a study's impact but this type of reporting is hindered by the lag time that often accompanies scholarly publishing as well as other issues. Plum Analytics uses real-time information to provide insights into what is happening with research for users that need information on how research output is being utilised, interacted with and talked about around the world for reporting and evaluation purposes, to help securing funding or for other reasons.
These insights include a more complete picture of research than citations alone, answering questions about research impact by gathering metrics from the places people interact with research artifacts such as articles, clinical trials, blog posts, grants, books, theses/dissertations, webpages and more. These metrics are then categorised into Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media and Citations.
The PlumX Suite includes five products that were created to ensure that an individual user or organisation had the precise tools to meet their needs.
The five products that comprise the PlumX Suite are PlumX Metrics – focuses on helping library's get more value from their institutional repository; PlumX Dashboards – helps all involved with research to understand the impact of their research without waiting years for citation information; PlumX +Grants – gives both grant makers and foundations and research institutions greater insight about the impact and ROI of the grants they fund or receive; Plum X Benchmarks – designed to provide comparisons between institutions based on Plum Analytics' five categories of metrics; and PlumX Funding Opportunities – allows customers to find the right funding opportunities from popular funding sources in the US.
The PlumX Suite includes the only metrics products available that incorporates usage with other modern metrics and the data and analysis is more current in comparison to competitors because of the use of these modern metrics. Only PlumX Suite can provide research output and metrics categorized by grants; has user-defined groups and hierarchies; and offers a benchmarking product that includes non-citation metrics.
