Comparisons on the Fly: Grouping and Moving Researchers for Better Altmetrics Analytics

We’re excited to announce a new feature in PlumX Dashboards: the ability to add researchers’ research profiles to multiple groups, and to move them between groups. Instead of relying on our PlumX support team to manage these changes, we’ve put this power into our users’ hands. This new functionality allows PlumX Administrators to easily create new groups and hierarchies, allowing for a richer set of comparisons and analytics.

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From the main PlumX Dashboard: different hierarchies answer different questions

To see the power of grouping researchers and their works in multiple ways, we can look at how a typical funder uses PlumX Dashboards. They modeled six different hierarchies in PlumX, sorting the researchers they have funded by Geography, Portfolio and more.

Each grouping allows users to answer different questions in the PlumX Dashboards Analytic Reports. Understanding your top researchers and subgroups per region, institution or portfolio either by productivity or by altmetric measures is simple once the researcher profiles are created and assigned to groups.

Funder comparing research from different institutions. The green bars represent Usage (Downloads, Abstract Views, etc.) while the grey bars represent the number of artifacts for researchers from that institution.
Funder comparing research from different institutions. The green bars represent Usage (Downloads, Abstract Views, etc.) while the grey bars represent the number of artifacts for researchers from that institution.

The California Institute of Technology (CIT) has an outsized impact in usage compared to the number of artifacts in the chart above. Digging into the research in the group, we found a highly-viewed video: a TedXCaltech talk with over 100,000 views.

This researcher’s profile, research and impact is rolled up within CIT when grouped by institution, but rolled up within California when users want to compare per-state metrics, or within the USA when comparing international research institutions.

How To Add Researchers to Groups or Move Researchers Between Groups

To access this feature, edit the profile for any researcher in PlumX Dashboards. (This feature requires permissions to edit a researcher’s profile.) Within the ‘Edit Profile’ page, you can see and edit the groups to which this researcher belongs.

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Clicking the small ‘x’ beside a group will remove a researcher from that group. Clicking ‘Select group from list’ allows you to pick any group in the hierarchy you’ve created, and add the current researcher to that group. Changes to a researcher’s groups are not saved until you save the researcher’s updated profile.

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PlumX Administrators can already add new groups to their PlumX Dashboards site. Now the power to explore different groupings of researchers and their academic contributions is within your control. What new dimensions will you explore – understanding your top performers or the rising stars per research area? By academic age? By grant source? We’d love to hear about the questions you are answering in PlumX.

If you’d like help in how you can leverage this new feature at your institution’s PlumX site, please contact us.