Autism Speaks, the world’s leading autism science and advocacy organization, has purchased PlumX™ to track the metrics on the research outputs that its funding has helped create. PlumX from Plum™ Analytics, an EBSCO company, will give Autism Speaks powerful and actionable information about the more than $200 million in autism research that it has funded since it was founded.
PlumX is an impact dashboard that provides information on how research output is being utilized, interacted with, and talked about around the world. It delivers a more complete picture of research and answers questions about research impact by gathering “altmetrics” or “alternative metrics” which are metrics around artifacts such as articles, clinical trials, blog posts, grants, books, theses/dissertations, webpages and more. The altmetrics are then categorized into Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media and Citations.
Ed Clayton, Autism Speaks senior director for strategic funding and grants administration says, “We’re very excited to integrate the PlumX dashboard into our existing research assessment strategies. With the new information that Plum Analytics provides we will be able to tell the stories of impact behind our research and better share these with others in the autism community.”
With PlumX, Autism Speaks will be able to gather and analyze metrics, at several levels including: Grant ID, Researcher, Institution, Research Topic, Grant Type and Geography. This will give Autism Speaks powerful and actionable information that can then be used to tell the stories of impact behind its work and give the organization a better sense of the return on investment of specific funding. Autism Speaks also plans to make the data available so that donors will see the impact of the funds they have donated. Researchers can receive credit for what they have done and newer researchers will gain visibility.
Plum Analytics President Andrea Michalek says that Autism Speaks is taking a pioneering step in using metrics to track their research with PlumX. “We are really excited about working with Autism Speaks to implement their research grants with new metrics that can benefit the whole research community by enhancing the way we look at research impact and scholarly communication.”
Plum Analytics is the only company synthesizing metrics data for custom analysis for each organization and for publishers and presenting the metrics in a variety of ways including data visualizations, dashboards, and widgets. For more information about PlumX and Plum Analytics, please visit: www.plumanalytics.com.
