Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A journal article's Plum Print on ScienceDirect shows a large Usage petal (thousands of downloads) but a small Citations petal (few formal citations yet) -- visually signalling that the paper is being read and used well before it has accumulated a citation record, since Usage and Citations are reported as separate, uncombined counts.
- Is an instance
A dataset's PlumX profile shows high Captures (many researchers have bookmarked or saved it in a reference manager for later use) alongside moderate Mentions (a few blog posts describing it) -- an institution reviewing the dataset's impact can see that the reuse signal (Captures) is strong even though press/blog coverage (Mentions) is modest, a distinction a single collapsed score would hide.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Adding a PlumX output's five category counts together to produce one 'total PlumX score' -- PlumX does not define or endorse any such sum; the categories are deliberately kept separate because they measure qualitatively different kinds of engagement, and Elsevier does not publish a combined-score methodology the way Altmetric does for its Attention Score.
- Not an instance
Directly comparing a PlumX Usage count to an Altmetric Attention Score number as if they were on the same scale -- they are produced by different providers, track different (if overlapping) source sets, and one is a raw category count while the other is a single weighted composite; neither converts into the other.
Editorial commentary
PlumX Metrics is a proprietary altmetrics product owned and operated by Elsevier, built on the metrics platform originally developed by Plum Analytics (acquired by Elsevier in February 2017). Rather than producing a single composite attention score, PlumX organizes research-engagement data for an individual output — an article, dataset, preprint, presentation, conference proceeding, or other tracked item — into five separate, non-aggregated categories: Citations, Usage, Captures, Mentions, and Social Media. This category-based structure is the feature that most distinguishes PlumX methodologically from single-score altmetrics products.
The five metric categories
- Citations — traditional citation-index counts (e.g. from Scopus and CrossRef) alongside citations that signal impact outside the scholarly literature itself, such as clinical citations (appearing in clinical care guidelines) and policy citations (appearing in government or NGO policy documents).
- Usage — signals that someone is reading or consuming the output, including clicks, downloads, views, library holdings, and video plays.
- Captures — signals that someone wants to return to the work later, treated as a potential leading indicator of future citation: examples include bookmarks, code forks, favorites, and readers saved in a reference manager.
- Mentions — evidence of engagement in public-facing written commentary, such as blog posts, news media coverage, reviews, comments, and Wikipedia references.
- Social Media — shares, likes, and comments referencing the output on platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, used as a rough measure of online “buzz” and attention.
Each category is reported as its own count (or set of counts, since a category can bundle several distinct sub-metrics such as “downloads” and “views” under Usage) rather than being combined into one overall number. A user comparing two outputs therefore sees, for example, that one has more Usage but fewer Captures than the other, instead of a single ranked score.
The Plum Print visualization
PlumX typically presents this category data as the “Plum Print,” a five-petal circular graphic embedded on the output’s page (for example, on a ScienceDirect article or a Scopus record). Each petal corresponds to one of the five categories, and petal size scales with the volume of activity in that category, giving a reader an at-a-glance visual comparison across categories before they click through to the full numeric breakdown.
Where PlumX Metrics appears
Because PlumX is an Elsevier product, it is integrated most directly into Elsevier’s own platforms — ScienceDirect and Scopus — where Plum Prints display on article and record pages. It also appears on Elsevier journal sites, in Mendeley-linked contexts, and has been licensed for use in some institutional repository platforms (including Digital Commons repositories), where it is used to show authors and institutions engagement data for outputs hosted outside Elsevier’s own indexes.
PlumX Metrics vs. the Altmetric Attention Score
PlumX Metrics and the Altmetric Attention Score are both commercial altmetrics products, but they are built on different design philosophies and are not interchangeable. The Altmetric Attention Score, produced by Altmetric (a Digital Science company), collapses weighted mention data into a single composite number intended for at-a-glance ranking and comparison, displayed via Altmetric’s colored “donut” badge. PlumX deliberately does not produce an equivalent single score: it reports five separate category counts side by side, on the reasoning that citations, readership, save-for-later intent, written commentary, and social sharing are qualitatively different kinds of engagement that shouldn’t be collapsed into one number. Because the two systems track overlapping but not identical source sets and use different (or no) weighting logic, PlumX category counts and an Altmetric Attention Score for the same output are not directly convertible or comparable to one another — they answer different questions about the same item.
Relationship to the broader field of altmetrics
Altmetrics is the general term for the broader family of non-traditional, attention-based research metrics that emerged following the 2010 altmetrics manifesto; PlumX Metrics is one specific, proprietary, commercially operated implementation of that concept, alongside other providers such as Altmetric. As with any altmetrics provider, the same methodological cautions apply: signals can be gamed, coverage is uneven across disciplines and platforms, and counts measure attention or engagement rather than research quality. Data-quality and transparency expectations for altmetrics providers more broadly have also been the subject of formal standards work through the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Initiative.
References
- Elsevier, “PlumX Metrics: Uncover and tell the stories of research,” elsevier.com/insights/metrics/plumx.
- Elsevier Support, “What are PlumX Metrics?,” elsevier.support and service.elsevier.com Mendeley Support Center.
- Digital Commons (Elsevier), “Measuring Impact with PlumX Metrics in Digital Commons,” digitalcommons.elsevier.com.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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