News Archive

Traditionally, researchers have been limited to citation metrics when trying to assess the influence of their research. While these are still important and useful, they are only part of the story.

There could also be mentions in news articles and blog posts, discussions on social media, and a whole host of other interactions with the research that are not captured in the traditional metrics. These interactions are frequently more immediate and, as social media becomes increasingly prevalent, more numerous than traditional citation metrics.

To help researchers identify theses new forms of interactions, which are commonly known as altmetrics , UWA is introducing PlumX metrics, which will help to tell a more complete story in terms of the reach of UWA’s research outputs.
PlumX is a new tool which gathers a variety of metrics for scholarly research outputs. Aiming to look at the engagement with research holistically, it combines traditional measures such as citation counts with altmetrics.

PlumX allows researchers to identify how often one of their research outputs is:

• Mentioned in social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest), blogs and news outlets
• Downloaded in full text databases like Ebsco Academic Search Premier
• Saved in citation managers such as Mendeley.

In addition, PlumX will provide links to Tweets and news items referencing the research output.

PlumX tracks metrics for 40 different types of research outputs including journal articles and books. The metrics are then divided into the five different types shown below:

PlumX metrics are accessible in both the UWA Research Repository and Socrates. For each research output PlumX provides a PlumPrint (see image at the top of the page), which is a visual representation of the activity in each metric type.

You can view further metric details by hovering over your PlumPrint as shown below.

If you then click on see details you will be taken to the PlumX interface and can drill down into the data related to the output.

Here is an example of an article which has had 67 academic citations. However, as you can see it has also had a much broader level of engagement, having been tweeted 227 times, mentioned in 8 blog posts, liked on Facebook 376 times etc.

Visit the UWA Research Repository or Socrates and see how PlumX and your PlumPrints can help you tell the full story about your research.

For further information about PlumX and the UWA Research Repository see https://www.library.uwa.edu.au/repository/support-and-faqs#Stats

Media references

University Library +61 8 6488 7425