Plum™ Analytics New Product PlumX Gives Researchers an Edge

"Given this era of frequent budget cuts and a constriction of funding sources, it is important for those performing, funding, or monitoring research to understand the impact of research on a timely and accurate basis. It is in this climate that Plum™ Analytics launches their new product, PlumX™. PlumX is designed to help funders, researchers, librarians, and others at institutions to answer questions about research. PlumX analyzes data about research artifacts to provide a complete and timely view of not only research and researchers, but also the groups they are affiliated with such as labs, departments and institutes. People interact with research output in multiple ways. The online activities of other researchers and the public create data exhaust that PlumX harvests and aggregates to provide a comprehensive view of research impact. PlumX collects impact metrics in five major categories: usage, captures, mentions, social media, and citations. Within these five categories PlumX tracks over 20 different types of artifacts including journals, books, videos, presentations, datasets, and source code. All of this data is combined to give users easy to use tools to answer their questions about research, researchers, labs, departments and more. PlumX provides a suite of tools to help answer questions about research such as: How do I provide quantifiable research outcomes in pursuit of grant funding? How do I tell how departments or labs measure up to their peers? How do I discover 'rising stars' in different research areas for recruiting or co-research purposes? How do I monitor research marketing efforts? 'As someone who has spent my career manipulating large amounts of data to help individuals find hidden answers to important questions, I was excited to help move the research community beyond citation counts and journal impact factor to a place where research impact could be seen more quickly and with a wider perspective,' said Andrea Michalek, co-founder of Plum. 'As we’ve worked over the last year, we’ve come to realize that ‘altmetrics’ are quickly moving from alternative to mainstream. We developed PlumX to help librarians and others take advantage of that shift.' We invite you to try PlumX today by visiting http://try.plu.mx."