🤖 Overview

com.plumanalytics is a legitimate web crawler operated by Plum Analytics, a product of EBSCO Information Services, designed to collect public usage data and altmetrics for scholarly research outputs including journal articles, datasets, and conference proceedings. The bot feeds its findings into the PlumX dashboard, which aggregates metrics such as downloads, views, mentions, social media shares, and citations from over 60 different sources. According to Plum Analytics' official website and documentation, the crawler operates on behalf of academic institutions and publishers who subscribe to the service to track the real‑world impact of their research.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The com.plumanalytics crawler systematically visits URLs listed in publisher repositories, institutional repositories, and open‑access platforms like PubMed Central, arXiv, and CrossRef. It typically requests HTML pages and metadata endpoints (e.g., DOI landing pages) at a moderate pace, with documented intervals of 1–3 seconds between requests to avoid overloading servers. IP ranges used by Plum Analytics are primarily assigned to EBSCO’s corporate network and originate from US‑based data centers, though no fixed public blocklist is released. The crawler respects standard HTTP protocols, including Accept and User‑Agent headers, and supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS. It does not execute JavaScript or parse dynamic content; instead, it relies on static HTML and structured metadata embedded in pages (e.g., Dublin Core, Highwire Press tags). Plum Analytics publishes no official list of IP ranges, but network administrators can identify the bot through reverse DNS lookups that resolve to plumanalytics.com subdomains.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Based on official documentation and community reports, the com.plumanalytics crawler fully respects robots.txt directives. The Plum Analytics support site explicitly states that their bots will not crawl any page or path that is disallowed by the site owner. If a publisher or repository wishes to opt out entirely, they can add a Disallow: / rule for the User‑Agent com.plumanalytics. There are no known cases of the bot ignoring robots.txt, and it does not use any workaround for blocked paths.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identifier is the User‑Agent string: com.plumanalytics (case‑insensitive). Occasionally, additional clues include the referrer header pointing to plumanalytics.com or reverse DNS entries matching *.plumanalytics.com. The bot does not send custom HTTP headers beyond standard ones, and its request pattern is regular and non‑aggressive. Web logs can be scanned for the User‑Agent string to differentiate it from other academic crawlers such as PLOS or CrossRef.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is exclusively used for altmetrics – specifically, to populate the PlumX dashboard with usage counts, captures, mentions, and social media interactions for research outputs. This aggregated data helps universities, funders, and publishers assess the broader impact of research beyond traditional citation counts. No personal data of end users is collected; only publicly available metrics are harvested. Plum Analytics states that the data is never sold to third parties and is only accessible to subscribers of the PlumX service.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although com.plumanalytics is not malicious, it may still be rate‑limited by server administrators because its systematic crawling can consume bandwidth and server resources, especially on sites with low traffic. A rate limit ensures a fair distribution of resources for all legitimate crawlers and human visitors. The standard policy is to allow the bot a modest request rate (e.g., one request per 2 seconds) and to block only if it exceeds that threshold.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.