PlumX: a tool to showcase academic profile and distinction

Abstract

PurposeThe Saint Mary’s College of California (SMC) library plays an integral role in supporting one of the goals in the College’s Strategic Plan: “Raise the Academic Profile and Distinction”. This case study aims to assess the effectiveness of PlumX as a tool to showcase the academic profile and distinction of SMC. The library recognizes the importance of capturing impact of non-traditional creativity and engagement in addition to just traditional impact metrics of research. Design/methodology/approachThis paper describes the collaborative effort of the College and the College’s library to identify faculty scholarship, creativity and engagement and collect data demonstrating the impact of the works. Traditional metrics, like citation counts, do not do SMC faculty justice because faculty scholarship comes beyond just books and articles. To more fully document the real intellectual corpus the College, the library is working with a new system, PlumX, to collect web-based information about both traditionally and non-traditionally published work. FindingsThe collection of metrics across five categories (citations, usage, social media, mentions and captures), and the flexibility of displaying on screen or downloading for use in other analytic reports made possible through PlumX proved to be a start toward demonstrating the academic distinction of College’s unique faculty. SMC will continue to partner with PlumX to assess and improve its usability and effectiveness. Originality/valueThis paper outlines how altmetrics can be used to measure and share impact of faculty research at a liberal arts, teaching-focused college in ways reflective of the unique intellectual contributions.

Availability and Audit of Links in Altmetric Data Providers: Link Checking of Blogs and News in <a href="https://www.altmetric.com/">Altmetric.com</a>, Crossref Event Data and PlumX

“…Trueger et al (2015) made a critical review of the Altmetric Score, although, it was Gumpenberger et al (2016) who expressed the strongest criticism of the Altmetric Score as impact indicator. In the case of PlumX, Champieux (2015) and Lindsay (2016) described the utilities of the service, while Wong and Vital (2017) analysed the implementation of the tool in a specific organization. However, no studies have been yet published about the functionality of CED due mainly to this product is still in beta.…”

Research functionality and academic publishing: Gaming with altmetrics in the digital age

“…Moreover, it can be shown that PlumX Metrics also provides a competitive advantage to scientists who are more familiar with IT and web technologies and therefore can engage in gaming in social platforms in order to increase the significance of their research (Champieux, 2015;Wong & Vital, 2017).…”

Analysis of Tweets Mentioning Works from an Institutional Repository

“…Within the scholarly communications field, altmetrics have become a core competency for librarians and a popular topic in professional development (Cross, Oleen, & Perry, 2017;North American Serials Interest Group, 2017). Libraries have published on their experiences of integrating altmetrics with their IRs without delving into the systematic evaluation of altmetrics (Collister & Taylor, 2017;Wong & Vital, 2017). Even researchers selected IRs and libraries as the most trusted source of altmetrics (Zhang & Jackson, 2016).…”