Researcher Graph Helps Academics, Institutions Understand Works’ Influence

“... It’s about a seven-year time-span from the a researcher’s original ‘ah-ha’ moment, to the publishing of her paper, to the point where a critical mass of citations are formally gathered around it, as others read the work and cite it in their own research, says Andrea Michalek, co-founder of startup Plum Analytics. ‘Clearly the world moves much, much faster than that now,’ she says, with researchers posting slides online of talks about their work even before it’s published, and tweets referencing those discussions and linking back to the content, for example. ‘All this data exhaust is happening in advance of researchers’ getting those cited-by counts,’ she says, and once a paper is published, the opportunities for online references to it grow. Works live not only on the publisher’s web site, in institutional repositories, and also in many cases in Open Access repositories. From there, it’s only a small step to Delicious bookmarks and other pointers to the research. This new world is creating a need for alternative metrics, or, as Plum calls it, altmetrics, to understand usage of and interaction with a researcher’s body of work. And those metrics can be delivered with the help of the Researcher Graph that Plum is building, which mines the web, social networks and university-hosted data repositories as well as other relevant offline sources to create a map of the relationships between a researcher, his institution, his work, and those who follow or engage with it. RDF is the underlying data model for this, and the University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) is the recently announced first customer for the solution. It plans to use Plum’s technology to provide aggregated open metrics for the university’s research output, as well as for individual researchers to measure their work’s impact beyond traditional citation metrics...”