Are 20 citations good? That’s often a question we hear from our users – are my PlumX Metric numbers good or bad? It can be hard to determine what the metrics actually mean.

One way we can help is to provide some context, showing you how a given article or review in a specific journal compares to other articles and reviews published within the same journal. When you view a PlumX Metrics artifact page for either an article or review, you will now see 1 year and 3 year options in addition to the default metric counts.

When you select one of the options, you’ll see the metric counts change to percentiles. The percentiles illustrate how this article or review compares to other articles and reviews in the same journal in the specified period. In the example below, this article’s Usage and Captures are in the top 97% of all articles and reviews published in The Lancet in the past 3 years. Citations for this article put it in the top 95th percentile and it ranks at the very top for Social Media and Mentions.

While you’ll only see these options on specific artifact types, we do hope to find new and innovative ways of providing metric context for other types of research output. Let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions (email us at support@plumanalytics.com).