Now, these questions are getting easier to answer. Research metrics that immediately measure awareness and interest give us new ways to uncover and tell the stories of research.

Technologies that encourage communication, sharing and other interaction with research output—leave “footprints” to show the way back to who is interested in the research and why. Technologies that make processing big data possible—make it possible to categorize and analyze all of the metric data from the many interactions.

PlumX Metrics

PlumX Metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with individual pieces of research output (articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and many more) in the online environment. Examples include, when research is mentioned in the news or is tweeted about. Collectively known as PlumX Metrics, these metrics are divided into five categories to help make sense of the huge amounts of data involved and to enable analysis by comparing like with like.

PlumX gathers and brings together appropriate research metrics for all types of scholarly research output.

We categorize metrics into 5 separate categories: Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media, and Citations.

• Usage – A way to signal if anyone is reading the articles or otherwise using the research. Usage is the number one statistic researchers want to know after citations.
• Examples: clicks, downloads, views, library holdings, video plays

• Captures – Indicates that someone wants to come back to the work. Captures can be an leading indicator of future citations.
• Examples: bookmarks, code forks, favorites, readers, watchers

• Mentions – Measurement of activities such as news articles or blog posts about research. Mentions is a way to tell that people are truly engaging with the research.
• Examples: blog posts, comments, reviews, Wikipedia references, news media

• Social media -This category includes the tweets, Facebook likes, etc. that reference the research. Social Media can help measure “buzz” and attention.  Social media can also be a good measure of how well a particular piece of research has been promoted.
• Examples: shares, likes, comments, tweets

• Citations – This is a category that contains both traditional citation indexes such as Scopus, as well as citations that help indicate societal impact such as Clinical or Policy Citations.
• Examples: citation indexes, patent citations, clinical citations, policy citations