Andrew Plume
Associate Director – Scientometrics & Market Analysis
Areas of Expertise: Impact Factors and scientometrics; the role of the journal in scholarly communication; accessibility of literature.
Dr Andrew Plume is Associate Director – Scientometrics & Market Analysis in Research & Academic Relations at Elsevier, specializing in scientometrics (the scientific qualification and analysis of science). Through accumulating a broad spectrum of data that ranges from specific primary sources such as authors and single articles to the broadest data resources generated from countries and entire subject domains, Andrew studies information flows in the scholarly literature by analyzing patterns of publications and citations. His particular interest lies in the use (and abuse) of the Impact Factor and the emergence of alternative metrics for journal evaluation. Andrew frequently presents these topics, among others, to journal editors, learned and scholarly societies, and the publishing community.
After taking his PhD in plant molecular biology from the University of Queensland (Australia), and conducting post-doctoral research at Imperial College London, Andrew joined Elsevier in 2004. He has co-authored research and review articles in the peer-reviewed literature and is a member of the editorial board of Research Trends.
"The science of science is more than simply crunching numbers for their own sake. It’s about detecting patterns amongst the noise that tell us something about the fundamental workings of scholarly communication. Science is a very - arguably the most - human pursuit, and we see that emerge in our analyses every day.”
