This week we’re focusing on our brilliant research metrics partner, PlumX Metrics. PlumX is an extremely helpful tool that provides in-depth usage analytics on the research on SSRN. Plum takes a deeper dive into numbers such as social media usage, and gives you more insight into who’s citing a paper, for example, and what kind of social media buzz that it’s generating.

There are five categories of metrics that together make up PlumX, and all of them analyse scholarly research output for information that academics and researchers might find useful. We’ve listed the five categories below and explained what each of them might be able to show you:

• Citations: This category tells you about traditional citation indexes such as Scopus, but also citations that might indicate Clinical and Policy impact.
• Usage: This simply tells you how many people are reading, downloading or viewing your research on SSRN. Bear in mind this may slightly vary from the current numbers on the main SSRN display because of when the Plum X data feed is updated, so don’t sweat if you see small variances to the official SSRN number.
• Captures: This metric will tell you how many people have saved your research in some way so they come back to it later.
• Mentions: This category lets you know whether anyone has mentioned your research in a news article or blog post, outside social media. This can let you know if people are engaging with your research outside of traditional academic citations.
• Social Media: This key category tells you if people are Tweeting about the research or posting it on Facebook etc, and if there’s any ‘buzz’ about it.

On SSRN, there’s a helpful tool on every article page which tells us all about these five metrics. The tool is shown through a PlumX widget, that brightly coloured icon to the right:

You can see more information about what the different circles mean by hovering over the symbol with your mouse. This paper has garnered lots of attentions, so there’s a lot for Plum Metrics to share about it:

Finally, if you want to know more specific information such as who has Tweeted the paper, you can click on the symbol to show even more detail:

We love Plum X and we hope you do too: so make sure you click on that icon to learn more about the research you find on SSRN.