Imagine you are a researcher writing a grant application on your research topic, or a department head wanting to evaluate your department and conduct some departmental benchmarking. How can you demonstrate a researcher’s strengths to the funders or identify areas of improvement?
In SciVal’s benchmarking module, you can evaluate your research performance in comparison with others. SciVal has more than 30 metrics for you to choose and compare. Simply add the researchers and metrics that you are interested to the benchmarking table and start comparing!
Some of the most commonly used metrics in SciVal are citation count, h-index, field-weighted citation impact and publications in top journal percentiles. Metrics in SciVal are easily customizable to exclude self-citations and to filter by selected publication types or authorship types (e.g. first author, last author, corresponding, single author).
Figure 4: Benchmark multiple researchers in SciVal with metrics such as scholarly output, citation count, field-weighted citation impact, h-index and publications in top 10% journal percentile
SciVal also allows you to plot the metrics and provides visualisation for easier identification of patterns and trends. You can select the heatmap visualisation in the table view, or visualise using the timeline motion chart view, whereby the trail option allows you to easily see the progress over time.
Benchmarking your institution
Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) is a useful metric when you want to compare your institution’s or department’s performance with another. This is because FWCI normalizes for differences in citing behaviour across disciplines, subject areas and publication types. A FWCI of 1.00 indicates that the publication has been cited similarly compared to average articles. More than 1.00 means it has been cited more than the average, and less than 1.00 means it has been cited less than the average.
Figure 5: FWCI is useful in comparing multiple institutions as it normalizes differences in sizes and disciplines
Using the Benchmarking module, you can also compare grant funding awarded to different institutions. The awarded grants data are from major funding organisations across United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.
Figure 6: SciVal provides grant funding information of an institution
Have you seen our previous blog about SciVal’s overview module? Stay tuned for our next upcoming post on the collaboration module.
If you need more assistance on Research Impact Measurement, refer to our library guide here: https://libguides.nus.edu.sg/researchimpact
