Research Metrics: Measuring Research Performance

SciVal is a research intelligence tool used to analyse research metrics of researchers, departments, institutions, and subject areas.

SciVal is a product of Elsevier and uses Scopus – a multidisciplinary citation database- to access citation data. It receives policy data from Overton and Patent Data from various Patent offices around the world.

SciVal can be accessed online using your University of Dundee login credentials.

SciVal allows users to:

• Benchmark institutions, researcher groups and individual researchers with their peers to  measure and showcase their research performance.
• Analyse specific sets of publications or research areas. This can be done through  pre-determined datasets, such as for organisations, or from lists defined by the analyst themselves, such as individual School departments.
• Analyse current and potential collaborators across different sectors and countries. 
• Analyse topics that are gaining prominence worldwide and understand how involved an organisation is with that topic. They can also analyse under-represented topics in a research field to identify potential new areas of research for an institution.

SciVal uses Scopus as its primary data source for citation information and abstracts associated with text-based outputs. This means that only text-based outputs published in journals that are indexed in Scopus will be used in SciVal analyses.

It should be remembered that while SciVal provides a lot of information, it does not have access to all potential data sources. Thus, it is good practice to use other research intelligence tools (i.e. PlumX, Altmetric, Discovery) for a well-rounded analysis.

We’ve compiled a Glossary of the most frequently queried terms used in a SciVal analysis. If you require additional information, please contact the team at Discovery@dundee.ac.uk

Entity: An entity is the subject being analysed, which could be a single Researcher, Group of Researchers, Institution, Country, Topic etc. These can be chosen from a pre-set list or customised..

Publication Set: This can be anything from 1 to 200,000 publications that you define yourself or are shared with you by others in your institution.

Research Area: A research area can be created by you or provided by SciVal, representing any field of interest to you. Self-created Research Areas can contain up to 200,000 publications and are defined by either using other entities (such as Institutions, Countries and Topics) or through a search. Each week new publications from Scopus are added to the Research Area.

Topic / Topic Cluster: A Topic is a collection of documents with a common focused intellectual interest. A publication can only belong to one Topic. A Topic Cluster is made up of multiple Topics. There are 1,500 and a Topic can only belong to one Topic Cluster

Keyphrases: these are distinctive terms extracted from the entity's publications to help you understand the overall research focus of the entity

For more terms: select glossary from the help () menu.