PlumX: a tool to showcase academic profile and distinction

The Saint Mary’s College of California (SMC) library plays an integral role in supporting one of the goals in the College’s Strategic Plan: “Raise the Academic Profile and Distinction”. This case study aims to assess the effectiveness of PlumX as a tool to showcase the academic profile and distinction of SMC. The library recognizes the importance of capturing impact of non-traditional creativity and engagement in addition to just traditional impact metrics of research.

This paper describes the collaborative effort of the College and the College’s library to identify faculty scholarship, creativity and engagement and collect data demonstrating the impact of the works. Traditional metrics, like citation counts, do not do SMC faculty justice because faculty scholarship comes beyond just books and articles. To more fully document the real intellectual corpus the College, the library is working with a new system, PlumX, to collect web-based information about both traditionally and non-traditionally published work.

The collection of metrics across five categories (citations, usage, social media, mentions and captures), and the flexibility of displaying on screen or downloading for use in other analytic reports made possible through PlumX proved to be a start toward demonstrating the academic distinction of College’s unique faculty. SMC will continue to partner with PlumX to assess and improve its usability and effectiveness.

This paper outlines how altmetrics can be used to measure and share impact of faculty research at a liberal arts, teaching-focused college in ways reflective of the unique intellectual contributions.