Elsevier acquires Plum Analytics

Elsevier has announced the acquisition of Plum Analytics from EBSCO Information Services. The acquisition is aimed at enabling Elsevier to expand access to Plum Analytics’ altmetrics to more researchers and more institutions.

Plum Analytics was founded in early 2012 and is a pioneer in altmetrics, helping tell the story of research and researchers by revealing interest and usage beyond traditional measures. It gathers metrics about research from dozens of scholarly sources, media channels and social media, providing a broad measurement of scholarly impact.

The Plum metrics will be incorporated into Elsevier’s research products – Mendeley, Scopus, ScienceDirect, SciVal and Pure, as well as Elsevier’s leading journal and society partner sites.

Andrea Michalek, managing director of Plum Analytics, will continue in her role. She explained: 'Combining with Elsevier means we can take our approach to measuring research impact to a wider audience, we will benefit from greater development resources and access to a global network. Our founding vision was to bring modern ways of measuring research impact to individuals and organisations that use and analyse research. I’m incredibly proud that we achieved this and I’m looking forward to this exciting new chapter with Elsevier.'
 
Olivier Dumon, managing director for research products at Elsevier, said: 'We know altmetric solutions are increasingly important to the research community, providing a quicker, more diverse and complete measurement of performance. Combining Plum Analytics with our research products will give significantly more researchers a deeper understanding of how their research is being used and communicated. The acquisition fits with Elsevier’s strategy of helping researchers throughout their careers.'

Individual researchers who use Mendeley, a free social collaboration network, will benefit as their profiles will be enhanced with Plum Analytics’ altmetrics. Previously Plum Analytics’ metrics were only available to institutional subscribers.