AMSTERDAM, July 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --
Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced two new collaboration analyses capabilities available within SciVal Strata ( http://www.info.scival.com/strata), a web-based tool focused on the evaluation of research performance. SciVal Strata offers researchers and research administrators the flexibility to construct relevant contextual data to benchmark research teams or individual researchers, using a range of indicators based on Elsevier's Scopus data.
The collaboration analysis capabilities add a novel dimension to SciVal Strata, enabling users to assess collaboration between researchers. The new capabilities are:
- Geographical Collaboration Network: Enables research administrators and researchers to view the locations by region and country where a researcher or research team is or has collaborative links. Furthermore, it allows users to observe activity trends over time for any specific region or country. - Author Network: Allows users to view the complete team in which researchers or research teams collaborated. Moreover, it indicates how often those co-authors have published with that individual or team displaying their prestige according to the h- or g-Indices, measures that represent a combination of productivity and citation impact.
"By empowering academic and governmental research advisors and researchers to assess collaboration, SciVal Strata now provides a multidimensional way to evaluate distinguished researchers and early career researchers alike," said Niels Weertman, Vice President of Product Management, Scopus and SciVal. "Furthermore, this new approach will support strategic decisions including recruitment and partnerships, ultimately improving research outcomes."
For an early career researcher who has published few articles and has not yet gained a critical mass of citation counts (an indicator for traditional performance analysis), geographical collaboration and prestigious co-authors may indicate that the researcher is viewed positively in the field and able to attract established scientists for collaboration - all qualifications for potential recruitment or funding applications. By providing this novel approach to evaluating research performance, SciVal Strata continues to enable researchers and research administrators to identify the strengths of research teams and individual researchers most relevant to their field of expertise, topics of interest or career stage.
