Author: Raidell Avello Martínez – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
From the large volume of information stored in the scientific databases, reports and services of science performance statistics are generated, which allows socializing emerging scientific trends and researchers and more influential centers in the various fields of science. This type of analytical resources is an essential tool for politicians, analysts, universities, laboratories, publishers and foundations, as well as the scientific press.
The main academic publishers such as Clarivate Analytics and Elsevier, based on their scientific databases respectively, generate reports and services that guide researchers to where science is going, what are the main research niches, the emerging topics and where it publishes the most and appointments are received.
Although in this post I will only comment one of each editorial: Essential Science Indicators and SciVal, there are other complementary such as Incites, Mendeley, Endnotes, among others that also provide very useful and complementary information about it and that have already been addressed in other entries.
Essential Science Indicators
https://clarivate.com/products/essential-science-indicators/
The database of Essential Science Indicators, from WoS, reveals the emerging scientific trends, as well as people, institutions, documents, journals and influential countries in the different fields of research. This database is built with statistics of scientific trends extracted from more than 12 million articles in more than 12,000 journals around the world, offers comprehensive coverage to efficiently analyze and compare the performance of research, identify significant trends, and potential collaborators.
SciVal
https://www.scival.com/
On the other hand, there is SciVal, an Elsevier analysis solution, which provides comprehensive access to the research performance of more than 14,000 research institutions and their associated researchers from 230 countries around the world. SciVal allows you to visualize the performance of your research, compare with your colleagues, develop strategic partnerships, identify and analyze new emerging research trends and create customized reports exclusively.
Advantages of both
Today’s research landscape requires researchers and institutions to continuously develop more effective ways to inform research strategy and evaluate research activities. Through advanced data analysis (bigdata) and supercomputer technology, these services can process large amounts of data to generate powerful analysis and visualizations on demand.
In addition, they allow you to evaluate your own research activities and the scientific community, from a variety of perspectives to help you develop, execute and evaluate strategies based on reliable evidence. For example, SciVal, they have an intuitive interface that allows you to instantly analyze more than 50 million records of publications of more than 22,000 journals of more than 5,000 publishers around the world. With access to more than 280 billion metric values, which allows us to quickly provide a context for analysis and generate powerful data visualizations to inform their decision-making processes regarding scientific research.
Disadvantage
It is important to highlight that both services are commercial, although of very good quality, the access level of developing countries is very limited, so, in another entry, I will approach complementary and alternative services of free access.
Finally…
There are also services and trend reports that, although they are not always based on scientific information, help to glimpse the advances of ICT that will have an impact on education and society in the short, medium and long term. I refer to the NMC Horizon Report (New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative) and Innovating Pedagogy (by the Open University in collaboration with the Center for the Science of Learning & Technology, University of Bergen, Norway).
