Pacifica Graduate Institute is an accredited graduate school located in Santa Barbara, CA offering masters and doctoral degree programs framed in the traditions in Depth Psychology. Half of the faculty is actively involved with research, while the other half are scholar practitioners with a focus on their practices.

One of the challenges at Pacifica is that because their faculty are in the social sciences, and a rather esoteric branch, their research does not fit the citation count method of assessing impact. Specifically, they produce a lot of monographs and presentations. They want to be able to showcase this research, but the usual tools would not work.

Alain Dussert, Director of Library Services, said he saw a presentation on altmetrics about a year ago and it opened his mind to the possibilities of tracking influence beyond citation counts. In his words, “Our faculty are esoteric and old school, but they do show up in monographs and YouTube presentations.”  When EBSCO acquired Plum^TM Analytics, Dussert saw it as a validation of altmetrics and he seriously started looking at PlumX^TM.

Pacifica became a PlumX customer in June, and since then they have loaded most of their faculty researchers and their research output, including monographs and YouTube videos. Dussert states that they have found how well PlumX deals with monographs, “WorldCat holdings are very useful.” First, they now have an easy way to see what libraries hold the monographs their faculty have created. Second, using the OCLC Control Number is a good way to track Pacifica research as not everything they’ve created has an ISBN.

Below is a monograph published in 2011.

As you can see from the PlumX usage statistics, 45 libraries hold this book. If we investigate further, we can see also that there are 11 readers on Goodreads, and reviews and ratings on Amazon and Goodreads.

Dussert sees many uses of PlumX at Pacifica. For starters, he thinks his admissions department will use it to “show off rock stars to prospective students.” Another use is as a centralized location to show accrediting agencies the research that has been done.

Dussert is looking forward to using PlumX more and more because it is so flexible and can be used for many purposes.