Uncovering the Local Story with PlumX Benchmarks

Recently I spoke at two conferences in the US – the UIDP (University Industry Demonstration Partnership) Conference in Knoxville, TN and the SRA (Society of Research Administrators) Conference in Las Vegas, NV. At each conference I demonstrated the power of the recently released PlumX Benchmarks product using fun local examples.

PlumX Benchmarks allows institutions to compare themselves against their peers in brand new ways. Using recent NIH grant data, institutions can benchmark across the five categories of metrics: Usage, Mentions, Captures, Social Media, and Citations.

In addition, PlumX Benchmarks allows institutions to compare by specific Spending Categories and/or grants from specific Institutes and Centers.

At the UIDP I showed off the following charts for Tennessee institutions:

Benchmarks Blog Post Screen 1

Benchmarks Blog Post Screen 2

We are comparing four Tennessee institutions on the garnered Social Media metrics for the output of NIH grants with which they are associated in the last four years. Notice how in the first chart that Vanderbilt has far more social media metrics associated with their output. But that is mostly because they have A LOT more articles coming from A LOT more grants. However, in the second chart we see that for an average article, the University of Tennessee Knoxville actually comes out on top. Since I was in Knoxville, this seemed to go over well.

When I was at SRA in Las Vegas I showed the following charts:

Benchmarks Blog Post Screen 3

Benchmarks Blog Post Screen 4

Since I was in Nevada I wanted to see how the University of Nevada, Reno compared to places like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. The University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) has several focuses for medical research one of which is HIV/AIDS. In the first chart above you can see that UNR leads the other three institutions in how many times their NIH-sponsored articles for HIV/AIDS research are accessed on average. The second chart shows that UNR compares quite favorably with the other three institutions in the Captures category—that is how much on average their HIV/AIDS is saved, favorited, and bookmarked. Note that Captures can be a leading indicator of citations.

It is exciting to look at research output in new ways and discover new insights. Let us know if you want to look at this benchmark data to see what you can find about your institution. https://plumanalytics.com/about/contact/