IPSWICH, Mass. — June 23, 2016 — The overall research experience for users of EBSCO Discovery Service™ and EBSCOhost® databases is improving with the addition of altmetrics data from Plum™ Analytics, an EBSCO company. By integrating the Plum Print widget into these platforms, users will have a view of modern metrics that allows them to uncover new research insights.
EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) and EBSCOhost customers will be able to view the Plum Print to visualize the research impact of all items in the results list, including: articles, books chapters, e-books, and institutional repository materials. Powered by the PlumX Suite, the Plum Print visually changes depending on the altmetrics found in each of the five categories: Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media and citations, providing added research insight at the artifact level.
The Plum Print will appear in the EDS and EBSCOhost search results, giving researchers a highly visual way of evaluating resources, and the ability to quickly focus on information of interest to them. Hovering over the Plum Print highlights a brief visual breakdown of the altmetrics, and clicking on it brings users to the Plum Suite platform for more in-depth information.
EBSCO Vice President of SaaS Strategy, Tamir Borensztajn says the Plum Print will improve the research experience of EBSCO Discovery Service and EBSCOhost users. “Helping our users find pertinent content they’re searching for is a key objective across our business. The integration of the Plum Print into EBSCO Discovery Service and EBSCOhost gives users additional means to evaluate search results, creating a more user-focused research experience.”
EBSCO Senior Vice President of Business Development and Strategy Mark Herrick says the integration is one way EBSCO is using its technological assets to improve the research experience. “As EBSCO moves forward as a technical innovator for libraries and their institutions, we think altmetrics is an important component for them. That was our initial motivation in January 2014 when we acquired Plum Analytics. Since that time we’ve done a lot of careful work, including a trial roll-out of the Plum Print in our CINAHL® database, building a scalable infrastructure, and gathering metrics for a very large number of articles and other research artifacts to give users of EDS and other databases an optimal experience.”
Plum Analytics Co-Founder and President, Andrea Michalek said user testing conducted during the Plum Print integration into CINAHL databases proved overwhelmingly positive. “Most users noticed the Plum Print right away and understood how it could help them with their research. Those findings gave us the confidence to make the feature available to a much wider audience.”
About Plum™ Analytics
Plum Analytics was founded in 2012 to bring modern ways of measuring research impact to individuals and organizations that use, fund, support, perform, publish or analyze research. Plum Analytics provides contemporary information about research impact and gathers metrics (often called altmetrics) about research from more than 30 sources (including PLOS, PubMed and YouTube) and categorizes them into Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media and Citations. The PlumX Suite is comprised of five products that ensure that information on research output is available to those that fund, perform, support or publish research based on the unique needs of each group. For more information, visit www.plumanalytics.com.
About EBSCO Information Services
EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is the leading discovery service provider for libraries worldwide with more than 10,000 discovery customers in over 100 countries. EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) provides each institution with a comprehensive, single search box for its entire collection, offering unparalleled relevance ranking quality and extensive customization. EBSCO is also the preeminent provider of online research content for libraries, including hundreds of research databases, historical archives, point-of-care medical reference, and corporate learning tools serving millions of end users at tens of thousands of institutions. EBSCO is the leading provider of electronic journals & books for libraries, with subscription management for more than 360,000 serials, including more than 57,000 e-journals, as well as online access to more than 800,000 e-books. For more information, visit the EBSCO website at: www.ebsco.com. EBSCO Information Services is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., a family owned company since 1944.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Vice President of Communications
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebsco.com
