PlumX As a Potential Tool to Assess the Macroscopic Multidimensional Impact of Books

Abstract

The main purpose of this macro-study is to shed light on the broad impact of books. For this purpose, the impact of a very large collection of books (more than 200,000) has been analyzed by using PlumX, an analytical tool providing a great number of different metrics provided by various tools. Furthermore, the study also describes the changes in the values of the most significant measures and indicators over time. The results show that the usage counts in comparison to the other metrics are quantitatively predominant. Catalog holdings and reviews represent a book’s most characteristic measures deriving from its increased level of impact in relation to prior results. Our results also corroborate the long half-life of books within the scope of all metrics, excluding views and social media. Despite some disadvantages, PlumX has proved to be a very helpful and promising tool for assessing the broad impact of books, especially because of how easy it is to enter the ISBN directly as well as its algorithm to aggregate all the data generated by the different ISBN variations.