How a Good Taxonomy Can Provide Valuable Business Insights Kristen Monahan, Public Library of Science (PLOS) Kristen is a business analyst and she won’t be talking about the PLOS taxonomy but rather how she uses that taxonomy to drill down into the massive amount of content, metadata, and usage and process data that is PLOS for deep, detailed analysis and to drive business decisions. Much of this work involves trend analysis. For example, trend analysis of submissions can look at the time it takes from submission to decision by subject (narrow subjects like Covid, broad subjects like biotechnology), or by institution, or by country, etc. to see not just the overall big picture but where in their submission and peer review workflows the bottlenecks might be. A trend analysis of topics over time can prompt them to issue a call for papers for a topic they think needs to be better covered–and then look at both short-term and long-term trends resulting from that call to papers. Their taxonomy doesn’t just make their content smarter–it makes how they publish that content smarter too.